


ask ourselves what road to take

by t_fic (topaz), topaz, topaz119 (topaz)



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Hawkeye (Comics), Marvel (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Deaf Clint, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Male Friendship, Male-Female Friendship, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Reconciliation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-26
Updated: 2014-06-26
Packaged: 2018-01-02 16:28:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 47,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1059031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/topaz/pseuds/t_fic, https://archiveofourown.org/users/topaz/pseuds/topaz, https://archiveofourown.org/users/topaz/pseuds/topaz119
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clint knew it was going to be bad as soon as he looked up from whatever the hell Nat had gotten for him to eat and saw Fury standing in front of him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Clint knew it was going to be bad as soon as he looked up from whatever the hell Nat had gotten for him to eat and saw Fury standing in front of him.

"Walk with me, Agent."

Fury strode off, clearly not even entertaining the thought that Clint wouldn't follow, which was, well, basically true. Clint hauled himself to his feet without even thinking about it. The rest of the team looked startled (Banner and Rogers) and annoyed (Stark) but then Clint saw the expression in Natasha's eyes (fear and sadness, everything that it had taken years for her to lose after she'd come in with him and left the Red Room behind) and _knew_.

Fury was silent as they navigated their way out of the little shawarma joint and halfway down the block. Clint finally couldn't take it any longer.

"It's Phil, isn't it?"

"He went up against Loki on his own," Fury said. "Held him off for a bit, Thor says, but..." Every word dropped whole and echoing into Clint's ears, Fury sounding more tired and sorrowful than Clint had ever heard him. It was just one more incomprehensible thing in a week that was pretty much defying description already. "I got there right before the triage team called it."

Clint stood there in the middle of the bombed-out street and tried to figure out what he was supposed to be feeling. Sad, yeah. Angry--hell yeah. That was all there, but muted. Mostly--mostly he was numb.

"Barton?" Fury was looking at him like he wasn't sure Clint had heard him, so Clint clawed together some kind of a response before Fury felt like he needed to repeat himself.

"Yeah," Clint said, nodding once, short and jerky. "I'm--yeah." A horrifying thought came to him, and the words half-fell out of his mouth even as his heart slammed hard in double-time, "Nat knows, right? I don't have to tell her--?"

"The rest of the team is aware," Fury told him. Clint nodded again and it made no sense that maybe having to tell Natasha was the thing that tripped him over into feeling things, but it was what it was. He reached desperately for the calm he'd learned to call when everything counted on the shot and got centered enough that Fury's face was in focus again.

"Thanks," Clint managed to say. "For telling me, I mean." _For not letting it come from someone who didn't know Phil, who'd only have known Agent Coulson_ is what he meant; it was Fury's turn to nod.

"I'm sorry for your loss," Fury said.

"You, too," Clint said. Phil and Fury went way back, to the Rangers, long before Clint had come stumbling into Phil's life and Clint knew the depth of that kind of a relationship. He wanted to say more, say that he was glad Phil hadn't been alone at the end, ask for more details, but his brain couldn't shape the words. "I should--" he gestured back toward the restaurant, like it mattered to the rest of the team where their wayward, suspect archer might be, like they could possibly care, but Nat was there and Clint desperately needed her baseline in this suddenly fucked-up reality.

"Clint," Fury said, and he was suddenly not the Director, but more the guy Phil used to call Marcus. Clint wasn't sure if that made it easier or harder to stop and turn back, but he did it regardless. "I know I wasn't always on board with you and Coulson, at least not at the start, but--you made him very happy."

Fury turned and got into the SUV that was waiting for him, leaving Clint alone on the street. It was, Clint admitted, probably for the best. He didn't know how he managed not to scream out his denial for the few seconds it took for Fury to get away, but he knew he couldn't have held it in for much longer. Clint hadn't made Phil happy, at least not as happy as he could have. Clint knew that, and now he got to figure out how to live without having the chance to fix it.

* - * - * - *

Natasha met Clint on the street, the rest of the team straggling along behind her. She looked him over once, swiftly. Clint was too exhausted to put up any kind of a pretense, so she got it all in a heartbeat. Clint didn't know that he'd ever seen her allow that much emotion to show, but yeah, it'd been a hell of a week. "Come on," she said, taking Clint's arm. She touched him carefully, as though she was waiting for him to shatter. Clint supposed it wasn't an unreasonable assumption. "We're staying at the Tower."

Clint half-stumbled as she steered him toward a line of waiting SUVs; he hadn't actually thought about it, but yeah, no, he couldn't see himself bunking out on the 'carrier, not after everything, and Phil's co-op was--fuck, no, that wasn't happening. Clint stumbled for real at that thought; he would have gone down but for Nat's grip on his arm. Her fingers were digging into where that last window he'd slammed through had cut him up good; he should have been spitting curses at the pressure on the open cuts but there was nothing in his head but Phil.

"Breathe," Natasha murmured. "Please, соколёнок, breathe for me."

It was too hard to resist her, especially when she was asking, not ordering. Clint didn't have it in him to disappoint her, too, so he focused again and breathed in, and then out, carefully, like he was going to take a shot, like he had with Fury. He wondered if that was going to be how he was going to have to function now, but even that was too much for his brain to deal with. He breathed and he went where Natasha directed him and he didn't think about anything else.

"I'm sorry," Natasha kept saying as they walked. "So, so sorry."

Clint hung onto her voice, vaguely aware that they were surrounded by the rest of the team and that they weren't just walking aimlessly. It didn't actually matter to him, but he did notice. He walked where Natasha told him and breathed like she'd asked him to, and when they got back to Stark's broken tower, he got on the elevator and rode to the top with them. It ended there, though. Natasha thought he should sleep, but that was a joke, and one that Clint wasn't even going to pretend to play along with. He shrugged her off and stepped out onto the landing deck, shattered glass crunching under his boots.

Deliberately, he walked to the edge of the landing pad. This high up, the wind swirled around him, cold and sharp no matter that it was May. He had a prime view down to the worst of the damage he'd helped create, but he still saw better from a distance and the longer he stood there, the more his brain started to work its way clear from the tangled mess of Loki and the Cube.

Getting free--that was why he was out there and he took one breath after the next, each one burning off a little more of it all, until he'd gotten rid of enough that he couldn't see anything but Phil, gone. Every time he forced his thoughts away they squirreled around on him and he was back in the street hearing Fury's _He went up against Loki_. Again and again, until it drove him to his knees and left him choking instead of breathing.

"Steady," Rogers said from behind Clint. He didn't touch Clint but he was right there, close enough that Clint could hear him over the wind and his pounding heart. "Steady," Rogers repeated. Clint wasn't inclined to listen to many people even in the best of times, but he'd just spent hours with that voice in his ear and he was too tired to fight it. Rogers kept talking low and calm; he was making it easy to listen to him and Clint held onto that with everything he had.

"I'm good," Clint said as soon as he could. He sounded like shit, like he'd been gargling shattered glass, but getting the words out gave him something more of a foundation to build on. He didn't know how much of it Rogers was buying, but he eased back a step, clearly giving Clint the choice as to whether he stayed or left. To Clint's surprise, he went with the stay option, despite being firmly in the camp where you go to ground to lick your wounds.

"Okay, maybe not good, but better," Clint admitted. He decided to blame his sudden candor on the fact that in a day coming straight out of a collective nightmare, he never once doubted the guy had his six.

"Agent Romanoff was… concerned," Rogers said, clearly searching for a polite way to tell Clint that he thought Clint had been freaking Natasha out.

"Yeah," Clint sighed, as he tried to figure out a polite way to tell Rogers that there was more going on than what was on the surface, that if Nat really had been freaking out she would have dealt with it herself, whether by harassing the shit out of Clint or by slamming his head into a wall again. "About that--"

"Right," Rogers said, one side of his mouth quirking up into a rueful sort of a smile, "I thought I'd just go along with whatever reason she had for wanting it to be me out here talking to you." Clint resisted the urge to shake his head to try and clear it--Nat's gift/concussion had left behind a dull pounding that hadn't yet run its course--but if anything might be worth an extra spike or two in the throbbing, it was the realization that the good captain had seen through Nat's maneuvering (or that Natasha had trusted him enough to let him see through. Clint wasn't sure which was weirder.) At Clint's surprise, Rogers' smile edged up toward a smirk, but then faded back to serious as he added, "Especially since I had a few concerns of my own."

"I'm--" Clint started with the automatic 'okay', but something in Rogers' face made it so he didn't need to brush him off. "--not going to jump," he finished.

"I could give you the speech about how it's never easy to be the one left behind, and how you just have to keep going, but since I ditched into the Atlantic less than a month after I found myself in a similar situation, it'd be pretty hypocritical of me." Rogers met Clint's eyes steadily. The wind bit into Clint's skin and he spared a thought for what that cold might mean to the man opposite him. If it bothered Rogers at all, he showed no sign. "I will tell you that the smartest woman I ever met told me that the very least I could do was to honor the choice that had been made and the man who'd made it."

Rogers said it evenly enough, but Clint could hear the layers under the surface tone; the grief and rage and guilt all but sang to Clint. Under all of that, though, Clint felt the solid determination that was all Steve Rogers, not Captain America. He'd spent a fair number of years giving Phil grief about his deep and abiding love for Captain America, but that had stopped once Phil had trusted Clint enough to stop brushing him off and actually talk with him. The serum, Phil had said, hadn't made the man; it just freed everything already there. Clint didn't know how much interaction Phil had had with Rogers before-- everything, but he hoped Phil had seen how right he'd been.

"I'm sorry," Rogers said, and Clint realized he'd been standing there staring at the guy for-- a really long time. "I didn't mean to stick my nose in--"

"No," Clint said, breathing in slow and long, like he was settling in for a shot. "No, you're right."

The cold air burned in his chest and lungs, but it reminded him once again that he was still here, against all expectations and odds, and that had to mean something. Clint had to make it mean something. It wasn't going to be enough--it was never going to be enough--but it would do for a start.


	2. Chapter 2

"Widow, you've got incoming," Clint called as he tracked the drones let loose by the as-yet-unidentified robot puppeteer. _Robot puppeteer_ , he snorted to himself--one thing he could say about Avengering was that it was never boring. Natasha did one of her flashy little flips--the kind she saved for when she was enjoying the fuck out of a fight--and landed just far enough behind the drone that she could blast him with her Widow's Bite.

"Oooh, shiny," Clint said as the robot sparked and jerked and collapsed in a smoking heap. Natasha flipped him off, knowing that he'd see it even from across the two city blocks and fifteen stories that separated them; he blew her a kiss in response. The drones kept swarming and he dropped two more of them with a concussion arrow before he went for one of the electro-shock models Stark had given him to test.

"Shiny yourself," Natasha said as the drone he hit stuttered and glowed, all fun and games right up until it exploded in an arcing, blinding flash of blue-white right in front of Clint's position.

"Oh, goddammit," Clint snarled, blinking furiously against the sudden bright-out in his vision. "Also, _fuck_. Houston, we have a problem, like, I can't see worth shit." Even better, he was standing on a ledge and basically, just a sitting duck.

His skin was crawling at the thought of how exposed he was, but the last he'd looked his feet had been only a couple of inches from the edge of the roof line and as much as it felt like somebody was watching him, drawing a bead on him, he couldn't risk moving, at least not until Cap barked in his ear, "Hawkeye, it's clear behind you, get down _now_ ," and he threw himself backward.

Clint heard the shield sing on its path over him even as he landed awkwardly, one hip slamming into the asphalt of the roof and his quiver doing its best to carve out a spot for itself on the opposite side of his spine. He was still trying to remember how to breathe when the vibranium hit something big, something a hell of a lot bigger than any of the drones if the noise meant anything, and then came zipping back.

"Stay down," Cap said from a couple of feet away, his voice echoing through the comm link in Clint's ear. Clint was happy enough to do just that. The shield went flying again--Clint tracked it by that little whine it made as it spun through the air, which would have been deeply cool if he wasn't currently half-blind and trying not to freak the fuck out about that little detail--and took out two of the smaller things before boomeranging back to smack into Cap's hands right over Clint's head. "Status?" Cap asked Clint.

"I could probably run a marathon off the adrenaline rush, but yeah, I'm good," Clint said. He could see well enough by then to know Cap (or someone vaguely Captain-America-shaped; things hadn't quite progressed enough to actually see features) was crouching down next to Clint, the shield covering them both. Iron Man's repulsor blast and the subsequent multiple-drone-explosions didn't come as much of a surprise, but they were definitely much appreciated, especially once Cap called the all-clear and Clint could tell his adrenal glands to stand down and stop trying to give him a heart attack.

"Overkill on the electrified arrows?" Tony asked, that thoughtful _I'm-inventing_ tone in his voice. He touched down on the roof next to where Clint had managed to sit up while he blinked furiously against the dancing spots in his vision.

"Maybe a tidge," Clint deadpanned. Next to him, Cap snorted at Clint's deliberately anachronistic choice of words--yeah, and Clint might have been giving Cap a little poke in the never-ending yes-Rogers-we're-gonna-drag-you-into-the-21st-century campaign, like Cap thought temporary blindness was an excuse not to--but otherwise didn't stop coordinating the cleanup.

"Oh, good one," Tony said, back to his baseline obnoxious. He clumped closer and flapped an arm at Clint. "How many fingers am I holding up?"

"I dunno; how many am _I_ holding up?" Clint waved his middle finger at the red-gold blur and Tony laughed.

"If you two are done with the pleasantries, I'm thinking our marksman's eyes are worth a trip to SHIELD Medical," Cap said.

"I'm thinking they're worth a house call from the head of ophthalmology at NYU, but yeah, sure, we can start with SHIELD," Tony said. "And I'm guessing I'm on escort duty."

"That would help," Cap said. He had a thing about anyone on the team going through anything medically-related alone and, being the stubborn bastard he was, had made it SOP that nobody went anywhere without a partner in tow. Clint didn't think it was only because he didn't trust SHIELD, but… Natasha had been known to say that Cap's trust was hard to lose and harder to gain back and Clint had a policy of not arguing with Natasha.

"Come on, Katniss. Chop, chop," Tony said, right as a helicopter, one of the little tactical ones dropped down and landed on the far side of the roof. Even if Clint had wanted to argue, to insist he was fine, no one would have heard him. There was still a part of him that wanted to do just that, but that was nothing but the remains of the old Clint, the one who had been retired a year ago on the roof of Stark Tower. The new Clint took the hand Stark was offering, hauling himself to his feet and following Tony's never-ending monologue the rest of the way to the chopper.

* - * - * - *

Clint was probably never going to be welcomed with open arms on the helicarrier, but in the year since Loki and the Chitauri had gone down, he'd kept his mouth shut and his body language neutral and it had gotten to the point that people didn't visibly flinch away from him when he came around a corner.

As fucked up as it was, Medical was actually one of the least stressful places. Clint thought it was because everyone there had a job to do when he was around and they focused on getting it done. He'd always had a knee-jerk bad reaction towards the medical profession--it wasn't exactly a surprise that his childhood had beaten that into him--but he'd spent the last year taking it all out and looking at it in the bright light of adulthood and if he still wasn't totally over it, he'd gotten to where he could fake his way through an exam without completely freaking out the people working on him. It wasn't much, but every inch of the ground he'd gained had been hard fought and he'd take whatever he could get.

The trauma team looked him over and passed him off to the ophthalmology team. Having _more_ bright lights flashed into his eyes seemed counter-productive to Clint, but what did he know? Tony hung out in the corner, riffing on whatever was floating through his brain, a monologue that was mostly incomprehensible to Clint, but still comforting, like white noise in a pair of headphones. He shut up when the doctors started talking, but that was more to let JARVIS record and monitor than out of any real need to interact with them. Clint didn't know exactly what Tony's issues with the medical profession were, but given all the shit that had gone down with the shrapnel and the arc reactor, Clint could respect the fact that Tony had them.

Clint's vision had cleared a lot while they'd been waiting around, and apparently the officially-administered bright lights hadn't revealed any actual debris in his eyes. They still didn't want to let him go--more than one reference was made to Clint's 'irreplaceable' vision, which, yeah, Clint got how important his eyes were, but they were all edging into that tone where he was nothing but SHIELD property and he hadn't liked that even before Loki had made him into actual property--but Tony stepped in with a curt, "I've got NYU on the line. Tower call from their top guy, tomorrow at noon, if that works with Barton's schedule."

The head doc didn't like that and didn't care who knew it. He hesitated about forwarding Clint's file and generally stomped right over that line where assets were people first, agents second. As much as Clint wanted to be gone, though, he'd sworn to himself that he wouldn't be checking himself out AMA in the future. He hadn't made it through a year to fuck that up now, but that didn't mean he wasn't happy when Tony stared the guy down until he agreed to discharge Clint into Iron Man's custody.

"Good thing he caved," Tony said as they made their escape down the corridor. "Pepper is out on the coast for a spa weekend--she's vicious if she's interrupted and JARVIS had half her number dialed."

"You didn't need to bother her," Clint said. "I coulda stayed."

"Right," Tony snorted. "Like I was going to leave you with a guy who'd have been just as happy to have had your eyeballs in a jar and gotten rid of the rest of you."

"Yeah, well, SHIELD doesn't really pay for bedside manner," Clint said. "But, yeah, thanks." His issues with authority figures skyrocketed when they came with a medical background; it was still hard for him to sort out what was and wasn't a legitimate issue, so it was nice to know this one pinged Tony's radar, too. Strength in numbers, or something like that.

They rounded the last corner, heading for the landing deck and freedom when they practically mowed down a suit who was walking and reading a file at the same time. Clint grabbed for the guy automatically, only noticing it was Sitwell after he'd dropped down to help pick up the files.

"Barton," Sitwell said. "Mr. Stark." He was stiff as hell and backing away almost before Clint could hand him the files he'd gathered up. He muttered something that could have been a thank you--or a fuck you--and disappeared around the corner. Clint stared after him, his brain spinning in circles at how much Sitwell hadn't wanted to be near Clint, to the point where he hadn't even tried to gloss over it.

"Okay, what the hell was that?" Tony said.

"The usual, I guess." Clint made himself shrug casually. He didn't think Tony actually bought it, but he didn't call Clint out on it.

"Jesus, still?"

"Sometimes. Yeah. I don't know... Sitwell and Coulson--they came up through the ranks together." Clint turned and started back toward the landing deck, trying not to look like he was running away, but not at all sure he was succeeding. "They were close, y'know?"

Tony followed after Clint, watching him thoughtfully, but he didn't press and Clint didn't have to come up with anything more to say, which was definitely for the best because he didn't have the first clue what more he could say.

A quinjet was waiting; Clint was almost pathetically grateful to be in the air and away from the 'carrier. Tony, showing the kind of tact most people didn't believe he possessed, was back with the techno-babble monologue and Clint let it wash over him and blank out the rest of the day. He made sure to check in with Cap when they got back to the Tower, but he let Tony fill in the medical details. Bruce had some tea for him and promised he'd be around for the consult the next day and Natasha looked at him sharply, as though she knew something had happened but only told him his bag and quiver had made it back safely and were stashed on his floor.

Clint let them fuss over him, but made his excuses as soon as he could, doing his best to let them think it was just his normal bad reaction to Medical that was wearing him down. That wasn't a lie, even if it wasn't the whole truth. Tony watched him go with a critical eye and Clint knew Natasha probably wasn't far behind, but he promised to be ready to meet with the doctors when they arrived and made his escape.

The thing was, Clint had thought he and Jasper had stitched things together pretty decently. They'd always worked well together, even if they didn't have much in common beyond a shared, unholy love of diner food. Jasper had been one of the few who hadn't gotten all shirty when Clint and Phil had started fucking, even going so far as to tell Clint he was the only person Jasper had ever seen who could bully Phil into having an actual life outside the job. They'd talked a couple of times after Loki and things had been… strained, but nothing that couldn't be explained by Jasper having been on the bridge when Clint had taken out the electronics during the assault.

Clint didn't blame Jasper--he'd studied the surveillance tapes that survived the assault on the 'carrier and seen the disaster he'd left in his wake and he knew getting over shit like that didn't happen in a straight line--but it had never gotten easy to deal with the fall-out of that week and coming at the end of a day like the current one made everything that much harder. Clint had a routine, though, one that he'd clawed together in the early days, one that kept him functioning and operational even if he felt like he was barely holding it together. He showered mechanically and worked his way through a protein shake and a bottle of water. His gear was stowed in the Tower's range; he'd go over it in the morning with a fresh eye and make certain it was clear and undamaged. His Kevlar had already been picked up by one or the other of Tony's bots; JARVIS had a process for evaluating it for stress and possible weaknesses. He'd checked in with Cap and the rest of the team, which meant he was at least close enough to done to run his checklist and make sure nothing had slipped through the cracks.

The Moleskine in the pocket of his duffel was scuffed and battered, held together with a worn and nearly shredded elastic, and yes, Clint was more than aware of the metaphor the damn thing was to his actual life even if he'd only barely skinned by his GED. It wasn't pretty, but it got the job done; and every time Clint slipped the elastic off and opened the notebook--which was to say, every day--he reminded himself that just enough was good and better than not at all.

At a page per day, he was almost through his third notebook for the year, but that was okay: Phil had loved the things and ordered them by the case. Clint still had a few dozen to work with. He was probably pathetic, but just holding one of them, remembering the hundreds of times he'd watched Phil scribbling in one--it grounded him in a way that little else did. Today, he needed that more than he had in a long time and he sat on the edge of the bed and just focused on breathing for a while before he flipped it open and started down his list.

He'd eaten real food and gotten enough hydration during the day. He hadn't skipped out on Medical and he didn't think it'd be cheating to use the time with Tony as his interpersonal interaction for the day, even if it was mission-related. He'd taken the muscle relaxants so his back and hip wouldn't seize up from the fall. He hadn't gotten any range time in, but he'd built in an exception for mission days, so that was okay. (On the flip side, he also got a skip on too much time with his bow, also due to it being a mission day.) His gear was solid and he'd run through some ideas with Tony in the morning. Line by line, he worked his way down the page, mostly checking things off, but occasionally making a note, until he was sure he'd made it through another day without letting the BS pull him under.

At the back of the notebook he kept a copy of Phil's SHIELD ID photo. It wasn't anything but a Xerox of his credentials, so it was worn and creased and faded even after only a year, but it was the one picture Clint allowed himself to keep in his daily life. At the end of the day, after he'd made it through the list he'd put together to keep himself functioning, Clint liked to flip back to the picture, if only for a second or two. It felt like he was checking in with Phil, letting him know Clint was doing his best to keep going and not pull the kind of stupid shit that had made Phil crazy when they'd been together.

Today, he sat and looked at Phil until the picture blurred into an incomprehensible pattern of gray and white and black. He didn't blame Sitwell--he _didn't_ \--but his reaction left Clint raw and exposed, and it didn't help that Tony had been right there to see the whole thing. There wasn't anything that could fix it, though, so Clint sat and looked at Phil until he could breathe without it feeling like he was going to choke and then he tucked his notebook away and made himself go to bed. He'd stood on the roof of the Tower and sworn to himself he wouldn't give up. He owed that much to Phil and whether or not he felt like it was worth it, he wasn't going to stop now.


	3. Chapter 3

As much as Clint hated Zemo and his 'research facilities', which was a lot, okay--he'd been a 'guest' more than once--he hated the little splinter groups even more. They all had serious inferiority complexes and always had to out-do the big boys when it came to creative questioning methods. After a couple of hours of him mouthing off and them getting more and more het up (hey, they kept asking him questions and the best way to be sure he wasn't giving up anything important was to go with the smartass answer that was always the first thing to pop into his head anyway), he finally passed out for long enough that they gave up and dragged him off so that he could come to in an impressively medieval cell.

Everything was stone as far as Clint could see, which, admittedly, wasn't far on account of how both eyes were mostly swollen shut and it took him a while to blink away the gunk that was gluing his eyelashes together to get to the limited range of vision he had in the first place. Still. He was laying on stone and everything he _could_ see was stone and it was cold and damp and dark.

"All signs point to: dungeons," Clint muttered. His mouth was pretty battered (he got why they always went for his mouth no matter how fancy the electrodes and needles and pincers were, but that didn't mean he was going to shut up, not until he was dead) so it kind of came out mushy, but again: not shutting up unless he was dead.

"Carved out of the living rock," a voice said. It was female and youngish and didn't sound too freaked out, so Clint wasn't sure if he was hallucinating or what, but decided after a couple of seconds that even if he was, he was okay with his brain giving him an imaginary friend to hang out with while the Masters-of-Evil-wannabe-freaks thought up new and exciting ways to make him hurt.

"Nifty," Clint said, letting his eyes close. "Also, didn't your mom ever tell you not to talk to strange men in dungeons?" It probably wasn't a good sign that he was giving advice to figments of his imagination, but it felt like it was important that she (or his brain) know that she (it) shouldn't just trust anybody they dumped in here with her (him.) (Whatever. His brain hurt.)

"Never had a mom," she said, and then something soft and a little warm came down on Clint and he fought with his eyes until he could focus again. Evidently, she was real (or he was so far past hallucinating he might as well be dead--and if he really was dead, he was going to bitch somebody out about how much he still hurt.) She was young, for sure, with long dark hair that hadn't had time to get matted or dirty, so Clint assumed she was a new resident. Her t-shirt was still clean, too, and the hoodie she'd dropped over him didn't have that stiff, worn-until-it's-rank feel. "Or at least not one I remember."

"Oh," Clint said. "Yeah, me, too."

"Bonding moment," she said. "I'd definitely instagram it, but--no phone."

"Too bad," Clint answered. "Probably would have gotten a ton of Likes."

"Yeah," she sighed. "I hate it when the psycho megalomaniacs are with it enough to interrupt my social media networking."

"Sucks," Clint agreed, closing his eyes again.

"Hey, don't," she said, shaking him a little, which was still hard enough that he had to bite back a groan. To be fair, it wasn't taking much to make every-goddamn-thing hurt, and she had the look of someone who probably didn't know how even a little poke could turn the dull ache of bruised ribs into a screaming agony, but he glared at her anyway. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry," she said, snatching her hand back. She looked horrified, like she'd accidentally kicked a puppy or something, upset enough that Clint backed off with nasty look. She shrugged helplessly at him. "I'm sorry, just… Stay with me, okay?"

"Fuck, kid," Clint panted, fighting to get his breathing under control. She'd barely touched him and it felt like he was about to puncture a lung, which was really fucking perfect. Dungeons, smart-mouthed girls who were way too calm to be innocent bystanders, and ribs that were almost definitely broken: his luck, as always, wasn't worth shit. "I appreciate you wanting company, but goddamn, I could really use a break from people wanting me to talk to them."

"You know, I can definitely see why they were trying to beat your mouth in," she said, and if Clint's eyes hadn't been mostly swelled shut, he knew he'd see a pretty good eyeroll. Since they were (mostly swelled shut), it was easy enough to let them close the rest of the way. "Seriously," she said. "Don't pass out--come on, you're too heavy to lift and I'm not leaving you here, not with how much the goons seem to like smacking you around."

"Leave me here?" Clint didn't bother to open his eyes. "You goin' somewhe--" There was the distinctive cough of a silenced gun but try as he might, Clint couldn't hear a body hitting the floor, which meant whoever was coming was badass enough to be shooting the guards from close enough to catch them as they fell. That… that was almost definitely going to be a problem, because who the fuck knew what team his little maybe-imaginary-but-maybe-not friend here was playing for, and, as already noted, his luck was for shit these days. He wasn't sure he could bring himself to care, though--he kinda thought he had a concussion in there with the broken ribs and it was making it hard to concentrate.

Then the door was opening and Clint's lizard brain did its thing, rolling him over in what was a seriously idiotic attempt to get him on his feet. What his subconscious thought he was going to be able to do once he was there was beyond him but he made it to his hands and knees before he had to stop to keep from passing out. Apparently, his brain had also decided the kid wasn't bad, because he'd moved to put himself between her and the door.

He gathered himself for what was going to be a severely ill-advised lunge at whatever was coming through the door. It wasn't going to do anything but mess him the rest of the way up, but if nothing else, he was going to go down fighting.

"Wait," the kid hissed, grabbing at him. "Don't be a macho idiot--"

Normally, Clint would have shrugged her off and kept right on going, but he wasn't, as previously noted, in top form and it took him just long enough to get out of the grip she had on his shirt for the shadow that had slipped inside the cell to say, " _Barton_?"

"Oh, hey," Clint said, willing his puffy eyes and concussed brain to work in tandem long enough to recognize the shadow. (Or for his brain to really go off into detailed hallucinations. He still wasn't a hundred percent sure which.) "May. Hi. I thought you were working a desk these days."

The shadow shrugged and said, "Some people don't take no for an answer, Barton. You should know that," which was downright chatty for how May had been for the last few years. It still sounded plausible enough for Clint to turn back to his kid, or, well, the three of her, because it maybe hadn't been such a great idea to throw himself around and jostle his brain more. "You didn't tell me you were waitin' on _her_."

"Hey, you were the one who was telling me not to talk to you."

"Yeah," Clint sighed, sinking back down on his heels. "Yeah, I did say that. Still woulda been nice to know the Cavalry was on the way."

"She doesn't like to be called that," the kid said, all prim and proper, and _jeez_ , Clint thought. _Everybody's a critic._ Still, the balance was tipping toward reality, because, frankly, he didn't think his brain was quite up to not only constructing Melinda May out of thin air but also lecturing himself about how she hated the damn nickname the analysts had saddled her with.

"Right," Clint said. "Sorry. Forgot." May gave him one of those eyebrow arches, one of the ones that used to make agents who were way badass themselves want to hide, so, in a bid for sympathy, he added, "Concussion?"

"Tell me you can still shoot and we can discuss your lack of tact when we're back on the bus." She held out a pistol, which Clint was very happy to see. Even better--it was a Kel-Tek 9 mm. Light, accurate, and did Clint mention light? 'Cause, yeah, the less he had to lift, the better off they'd be.

"I'm at, I dunno, maybe twenty percent," Clint warned, accepting the gun from her and checking the clip and the sight. "I'm going in and out of seeing three of everything so don't expect anything fancy."

"They're too proud for body armor," May answered, this time with a full-on eye roll. "We won't need fancy."

"Good answer," Clint said and let her haul him to his feet and steady him until the vertigo eased. She eyed him critically for another few seconds and then pulled a mini-tablet out of the bag slung over her shoulder and turned to hand it to the kid. Clint moved a little, experimentally, and yeah, everything still hurt. "I should probably also add that I'm not going to be moving fast. Ribs."

"It's always something with you, Barton," May sighed and Clint shrugged as best he could. She wasn't wrong.

"This is, you know, kinda interesting," the kid said as she tapped at the tablet, her fingers flying and a focused, intent expression on her face. She looked up and added, "In a wow-he's-at-twenty-percent-and-you're- _still_ -giving-him-a-gun? kind of a way. How does that fit within mission parameters?"

"Hawkeye at twenty percent is nothing to turn down," May said. Clint bit back the _damn straight_ that wanted to come out because he was above having to prove himself to kids these days, but he did let a little smirk slip through. It hurt like hell--which May knew, if _her_ smirk was anything to go by--but a guy works all his life to be the best, he was allowed a smirk or two when a stone-cold badass of a third party confirmed it.

"Whatever you say," the kid said dubiously, but since they were out the door and moving, Clint decided to let his aim do the talking. Or he needed all his breath to just keep up. Whichever.

He expected May to take point, but she stayed back with him and the kid. He couldn't object--he'd have done the same himself if the situation was reversed and he was working with an unarmed kid and a pretty compromised agent--but he'd had the impression that May had gotten a lot more hands-off as the years had gone by. It didn't really matter--she'd taken down the two guards they'd stumbled across without breaking a sweat--but Clint needed something to keep his brain off how bad he hurt and how pissed off Cap was going to be when he got back with the team. He hadn't been liking how Clint was still on rotation within SHIELD even before this op had fallen apart; Clint figured there was going to be some fast backpedaling going on after this mess. He might have to admit that he took the SHIELD ops because he couldn't stand the down-time, even if that was going to open a whole new can of worms.

For all her smart mouth, the kid was quiet as could be on the way out. Every time they crossed anything electronic, she'd slip away and hook into the system with the tablet. She worked fast, Clint had to give her that. They never spent more than 20 seconds at any one stop and she had the oh-yeah-I'm-good smirk going after every one.

At some point, Clint was going to stop and ask what the hell was going on, and why there was a SHIELD team there when nobody even knew about this splinter group, but probably not until they were somewhere that wasn't crawling with people who'd be just as happy to shoot him as look at him. They made it all the way to a door leading out to a courtyard before alarms started going off. The kid had just set up to do her thing at that terminal, too--Clint had an R2D2 joke that was dying to come out--but when May said, short and sharp, " _Now_ , Skye," she grabbed her tablet without a bit of pushback.

Clint could hear shouts and thumps, and goons were gonna start catching up with them if they didn't move fast, but he knew what was holding May back: the courtyard was a classic kill-box. Stepping out into it blind was an act of faith that there wasn't anybody on the walls looking to shoot first and ask questions later.

"While I was in the system, I blocked every access point I could find," the kid--Skye--whispered. "Auto-locked doors, changed access codes, that kinda thing. I figured it couldn't hurt, even if it wasn't part of the objective. I got them all, promise."

May nodded once and turned to go; the part of Clint's brain that had trained dozens of young agents approved of her letting the kid know she had confidence in her, but the rest of him knew that however good the kid was, there were people who'd go around her locks and blocks, no matter what it took. Still, Clint knew neither one of them was under the impression that their situation was going to get better. This was as good as it was going to get. Clint checked his clip one last time and they were out the door and running hard for a van. Clint was the weak link here; he could barely move above a trot, but May waved Skye ahead and stayed back to cover him. At least he was moving under his own power, which let May actually shoot. And he might be waiting for a rib to go through a lung, but he still took out two on his own even if the second one took an extra shot.

"Definitely not fancy," May muttered as she wrenched open the passenger side door.

"Close enough for government work," Clint managed to gasp in answer while he ducked down behind her.

The adrenaline rush got him to the van and into it, but then everything got blurry and weird, like he was inside a kaleidoscope. May was driving with one hand and shooting with the other, he knew that much. He kinda thought Skye had hot-wired the van before they got there, which, if that was true, Clint was willing to forgive the non-stop chatter that was bouncing around the van now. He was more than a little surprised May hadn't shut the kid down, but the more he made his sluggish brain work through it, the more he decided it was just how the kid processed and gave points for May for letting it happen.

He zoned back in at the sudden quiet, right in time to see Skye slip out the door and disappear into some trees. His brain, still not quite with it, but not so far gone as to totally give up, helpfully supplied the information that the van had stopped and they were off the road.

"We need to ditch this van," May said. Clint grunted in agreement and then slowly pushed himself upright when she laid out a few first aid supplies on the seat. It was kinda like being on assignment with Nat, lots of competence and nonverbal communication. By the time he got himself settled, May had cut long strips of tape (using a knife that Clint was deeply jealous of) and they managed to get his t-shirt pushed up and out of the way so she could stabilize his ribs.

"The kid?" Clint ground out, more as a distraction than anything. He assumed there was a plan in place, even if they were adjusting for his unexpected presence.

"She came in before I did, left a car in town." May worked fast, every strip of tape going on tight and neat. "It might be compromised, too, but they hadn't back-traced her to the hostel she was set up at, so using it seemed worth the risk. Better than stealing something else and potentially tripping those alarms."

"Sorry about complicating things," Clint said, experimentally taking a semi-deep breath. It wasn't great but he didn't think he was going to black out, so he'd count it as a net gain.

"You wouldn't be you without a certain level of complication," May answered. "But you're going to owe me for this one."

"Put it on the tab," Clint sighed. He let her butterfly the cut on his eyebrow and it got quiet, at least until there was the sound of a car engine fading in and out in the distance.

"I should probably warn you now about the car."

"God, it's an old Peugeot, isn't it," Clint groaned, recognizing the distinctive sound.

"What else would Ops get for a gap-year cover?" May said, one corner of her mouth twitching up into that wicked little smile that Clint remembered from a long time ago. He hadn't been paying much attention to stuff outside his own orbit for the last year, but he was glad to see she had maybe started to find her way back from her dark place.

May gave him a hand up, and he wedged himself as best he could in the tiny back of the car. The suspension was pretty far gone; between that and the state of the roads, Clint spent most of the trip more-or-less grayed out. May asked him twice if he wanted a hit of morphine, but there'd be no coming out of that if she needed back-up so he just set his jaw and turned her down. (Clint didn't want to diss the kid, but, yeah, her skill set wasn't going to help if things went to shit in a physical way.)

He kept it together long enough that he saw the plane as May turned them off the road and onto a grassy airstrip. Even if he hadn't known the agent who'd come for Skye, he'd have known they were SHIELD as soon as he saw that plane, big and bad and maybe not as beautiful as the original U2, but beautiful like home. His brain took that as permission to shut down.

May drove right up to the cargo hold, saying, "Go get Dr. Simmons, Skye, _now_ ," and the kid bolted out her door, yelling, "Jemma, Jemma, _Jemma_."

"Barton," May was saying from someplace far away. Clint could barely hear her. "Barton-- _Hawkeye_ ," and Clint came to at that, too many years of making his body move no matter what. He tried not to be dead weight as she dragged him out of the back. People were coming out of the plane: another agent and some geek types with a med kit, but it was the one behind them, the one shepherding them all out that tilted the world out from under Clint.

Clint's range of vision had narrowed down to a tiny bright spot in a field of black, but they didn't call him Hawkeye for nothing. He didn't even have to strain to watch as Coulson, as Phil-- _Phil_ \--walked down the cargo hatch toward where May had propped Clint against the side of the car, didn't have to strain to see the second he recognized Clint or how, for the first time ever, he refused to meet Clint's eyes.

After that, Clint didn't really need to see anything, so he stopped fighting and let the black win.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> People who know me know I don't like to leave characters unhappy when I'm done, but this felt like I needed to reiterate that I pinkie-swear there's a happy ending.


	4. Chapter 4

Clint regained consciousness knowing his situation had been less than optimal when he passed out, even if he didn't exactly remember why. It wasn't an unfamiliar position in his life, so he came to already focused on his breathing. He kept it slow and even, the four-beat in-hold-out of tactical breathing so his heart rate wouldn't spike and give anything away before he could work out the rest of it all. This time it came to him easily enough: Zemo's dungeons, May and the kid, the plane.

Phil.

Clint breathed through that, forcing all the questions and emotions down and out so he didn't come up swinging. If he'd learned nothing else in the last eighteen months, he'd finally figured out when jumping in headlong was going to make everything worse. It didn't mean he didn't just say _fuck it_ sometimes and do it anyway, but he did notice it these days. The trick was to keep his brain occupied with the other issues--like where he was and what the hell was going on.

Where he was, that was easy: on a plane and the odds were definitely in favor of the SHIELD plane he'd seen. They were in the air, moving with such an easy glide that he knew May had to be on the stick. He'd been in the right-hand seat once when she'd brought a C-130 down in what they'd later confirmed was a hurricane; he knew her touch almost as well as he knew his own.

She hadn't flown in years, though, not since the clusterfuck in Bahrain, and that brought Clint right back around what he was trying to avoid. _Some people don't take no for an answer_ , she'd said, like he knew exactly who she was talking about. He'd let it slide at the time, but how else was he supposed to interpret that now, other than it'd been Phil who'd talked her back out into the field? While he was _dead_ , while Clint had been mourning him and blaming himself, so deep in guilt and grief he could barely function.

The surge of rage and hurt and humiliation that followed on that thought blew Clint's focus and he heard the monitor pick up the corresponding spike in his heart rate.

"Agent Barton?"

Clint opened his eyes--he could have faked unconsciousness for a while longer, but there didn't seem to be any use--and blinked a couple times to clear his vision. There was another kid hovering over him, this one with a white coat and wavy hair pulled back out of her face. He thought she was one of the science types who'd come out to meet their little traveling circus. She smiled at him encouragingly but her eyes were careful and concerned.

"I'm Dr. Simmons," she said, peering at the monitors next to the table he was lying on. "You should probably stay still--I'm fairly certain you've been concussed, but there doesn't seem to be any internal bleeding. I'm not _entirely_ certain, sorry, I'm not a medical doctor--oh, I am in the biological field, just not limited to humans--" She hesitated, like she just realized how not-reassuring she was being, but then plowed on. "I'm very glad you're awake--Agent May left strict instructions that I was to reassure you right off that you're with SHIELD and we're headed to--well, I can't tell you where we're going, but it's somewhere that will have proper medical facilities and transport. We have another mission, you see."

She floundered a bit after that. Clint didn't suppose he was being very helpful, just glaring at her, but he thought he was doing damned well at holding everything inside him contained to a nasty look rather than tearing apart her lab.

"Coulson?" Clint might have been keeping himself physically under control, but his voice came out low and rough, close enough to a growl that his not-doctor flinched. She got herself settled quickly enough, though.

"Agent Coulson did indicate that he'd be in to speak with you," she said, crisply. She'd lost nearly all of her friendly warmth and eyed Clint with a determined expression, as if she were warning him off. She definitely knew something was up, Clint thought. "I'll just go let him know you're conscious, shall I?"

Clint didn't bother answering, only watched her turn and walk out of the lab without a backward glance. He added her to the long list of medical professionals he'd pissed off over the years and tried to find some kind of center to deal with this insane situation. He'd half-expected her to look at him with pity and explain that no, Agent Coulson had died over a year ago, but she hadn't so much as blinked at the name.

Before he could do much more than haul himself up so he was sitting (and fuck, but his ribs were not happy with him), she was back and Phil was with her, his suit dark and neatly pressed, his shirt crisp and white, as though nothing had changed. Despite everything boiling up in him, Clint couldn't tear his eyes away from how Phil was _there._

"Thank you, Jemma," Phil said, as quiet and calm as always. "You should probably go get ready for touch-down; I don't think we're far out." He smiled at her until she took the hint and left, but not before shooting another of those determined looks at Clint.

Phil stayed where he was for a long time after she left, and he was back to not meeting Clint's eyes, but when he finally spoke, his voice was even. "I'm sorry you had to find out like this."

Clint's jaw dropped. "As opposed to what?" he snarled. He wasn't only angry, but that was the easiest emotion to turn loose, like always. "Not having Fury lie to my face in the fucking street? Getting a call anytime in the last year?" Phil didn't answer, so Clint did it for him. "Yeah, that's what I thought."

"It was better this way," Phil said. He was still quiet, but Clint could read the agitation in how he straightened his cuffs, how his fingers lingered on the buttons. Or--no. Phil was standing here alive and well after eighteen months of silence; Clint would be an idiot to trust anything he thought he might have known. "No matter how hard--"

"Save it," Clint snapped.

Phil nodded once and fell silent. Perversely, Clint, of course, couldn't stop his mouth from running.

"I guess from where you're sitting, me turning you down every time you proposed was the best thing that ever happened to you," Clint said, poking at that scar with a morbid fascination. Phil _had_ asked him. Five times. Clint had turned him down with reasons that were true--the thought of that kind of commitment had opened up every insecurity he had and dumped acid on them--even as they became increasingly frayed and worn. Phil hadn't pushed, but he hadn't backed away either. Clint had thought he had time to get over himself, but he should have known better. "Fury probably liked it, too. No having to pay survivor's benefits. You know how much he hates--"

"Nick didn't like this at all," Phil said. He was pale now and not even pretending at calm. Clint couldn't ever remember seeing him like this, but then again, what did Clint know, really? "He set it in motion, used it to push Stark and Rogers when he thought I wasn't going to make it. He was ready to call it all back when I did. I--I wouldn't let him."

It got quiet again.

"Well," Clint said finally. He'd had a lot of things pulled out from under him in his life, but nothing quite like this. "Glad we cleared that up."

_On our final approach_ , May said from the cockpit intercom. _Crosscheck for landing._

"You should belt in," Phil said, gesturing toward a row of seats with harnesses and lap belts. Clint flinched back at the thought of Phil coming and helping, of Phil being concerned and distant, his skin crawling at the thought of being touched by that after everything they'd been to--after everything Clint _thought_ they'd been to each other. Phil froze and they stared at each other for another long few seconds before Phil backed out of the lab. "I know you don't believe me, but it was better you didn't know."

Clint didn't move; he'd taken landings a lot rougher than the one May was gliding them into while hanging half out of a 'jet and taking a shot. He could hear voices from outside the lab: the kid from the dungeons, the doctor from before. There were others, too, male, but not Phil. Clint kicked himself mentally for even listening for Phil's voice, but he didn't seem to have much control over it. He'd work on it; it'd be one more thing to add to his checklist.

May set them down so smoothly Clint's ribs barely twinged. He stayed there until she taxied them to a stop, and then he eased his aching body and pounding head off the table and shoved his feet into his boots. The lounge outside was empty, though there were noises, voices and footsteps, from further back toward the cockpit. Clint didn't stick around to see who was there or what was going on. Good-byes were overrated. He made his way toward the cargo bay, determinedly ignoring the red 'Vette berthed there, and then down to the tarmac. He deliberately looked up at the cockpit as he walked past, though; he might not be in the best place to deal with people, but a thanks-for-saving-my-ass was never optional. From behind her aviators, May watched him unsmilingly, but she nodded at his quick salute.

The station team not only knew Clint was coming, but were prepared for it to be _him_. A field medic met him at the door with a triage kit, and the officer of the day had a direct line to the flight deck on the 'carrier for him. For all that it was a tiny station in the middle of nowhere Eastern Europe, nobody bothered him with regs or SOP, just stayed out of his way while he arranged for a pick-up. Clint was not thinking about how it had been this way before the Chitauri, back when Phil had been running his ops. He wasn't.

"It wouldn't hurt if I ran you a line of IV saline," the medic said once they'd established that Clint's ribs weren't in danger of puncturing anything and it was going to take at least an hour for the closest in-air 'jet to get there for him. "And I could hit you up with something a little stronger than naproxen, too."

Clint okayed the saline but waved off the drugs. Half his headache was probably due to dehydration and he still wasn't in a good place with meds that fucked with his brain. The medic didn't press, but he did dig out a chemical ice pack that helped with the mess that was Clint's face and nudged over a six-pack of protein shakes without a single comment at how fast Clint was downing them. He managed everything so well, in fact, that Clint let him take out the IV needle instead of just ripping it out himself. As he walked out to meet the quinjet Ops had sent for him, Clint made a mental note to get an atta-boy in the guy's file. He honestly couldn't remember the last time an encounter with medical had been better than equal parts hassle and help.

His luck--or whatever it was that Clint wasn't thinking about--held on the 'jet, too, with the co-pilot already having an open line to the 'carrier, so Clint could start debriefing. Given that the damn courier milkrun he was on ended up with him in a more-or-less unknown stronghold of one of Zemo's splinter groups and tripping over an in-process mission from a second SHIELD team--even before he added in that it was a team run by an apparent dead man--he wasn't surprised that he got bumped up to Hill's watch.

Clint played it straight, just walked her through the entire clusterfuck. He thought he saw her jaw tighten when he got to the part about it being May who'd pulled his ass out of the fire, but he honestly didn't care, not by that point in his exceedingly long and fucked-up day. He finished right as they caught the hook on the flight deck--even strapped in, his ribs did not appreciate the jolt--and Hill let him go without making him jump through any more procedural hoops. Clint appreciated that, even if he'd had no intention of following any such orders; her not giving him a hard time left him with that much more energy for the really hard part.

Fury knew he was coming. Clint got waved straight through to his office without even having to open his mouth. He knew why Clint was coming, too, but Clint assumed he was going to make Clint say it. Fury still had a few surprises left, though.

"I don't suppose it'll make any difference if I told you I knew it was going to blow up in our faces, would it?"

"Not really," Clint said. "No."

"I couldn't not do as he asked," Fury said. "Too much water under the bridge."

"Yeah, I know that." Clint did. He always had. People liked to pay lip service to the whole brothers-in-arms deal, but it was real and true and as strong a bond as Clint had ever seen. "Doesn't mean I can keep on working here."

"I figured." Fury was astonishingly low-key; if Clint didn't know better, he'd say the director was admitting he was wrong.

"I'll have it in writing to you tomorrow," Clint said. He'd do it right away, but he wasn't sure his brain and fingers could actually string together a coherent, typed sentence.

"Take your time," Fury said. "I'm not accepting it, so it doesn't matter when it gets here."

"Sir--" Clint started.

"Indefinite leave," Fury continued, as if Clint hadn't even opened his mouth. "Personal reasons--I'll be damned clear that no stigma gets attached to it. Full reinstatement when you're ready."

"When?"

"When." Fury stood up and looked Clint up and down, and Clint knew he was taking note of more than the visible damage. "I'm not writing off one of my best people without a fight. Is that clear, Agent?"

"Sir," Clint answered through teeth clenched so hard that his head felt like it was going to explode.

"Good, dismissed." Fury looked pointedly toward the door. "Oh, and Barton? Take Rogers and Romanoff with you. They've been harassing my people since we lost you and while a rookie move like that deserves everything they're getting dumped on them, I am getting damn tired of being glared at every time I leave my office."

"Sir, yes, sir," Clint muttered. He slammed the door on his way out, which was petty as hell and also really fucking satisfying.

"Hawkeye!"

Cap caught up with Clint at the door to Fury's outer office; and yeah, 'glaring' was probably the best word for the expression on his face as he warned off all the agents in the area. 'Death ray from disappointment at the incompetency of their entire organization' also sprang to mind. Clint was just glad it wasn't directed at him.

"Let's go," Cap said, shepherding Clint into the passageway, not giving him any room to argue or change direction. "Natasha has a helicopter waiting."

"I love that woman," Clint sighed. "Hi, Cap." Steve grunted a semi-reply and kept them moving at a good clip. Clint forgot his beaten-in face and smiled at how people were all but hugging the walls to stay out of their way. It hurt like hell, but it was worth re-opening every cut.

Natasha was leaning against the canopy of a small, sleek, Stark helicopter. She inspected Clint with a familiar glint in her eyes--it was the 'dear god, my partner is a moron' one; Clint knew it well--but opened the hatch for him without a word. It took Clint three tries to haul his sorry ass up and into a seat, and it was impossible to miss the significant looks exchanged between Cap and Nat. It was a Stark helicopter, though, so Clint had to take a moment to let his abused body enjoy the comfort. It was soundproofed, too, so the sound of the engine and rotors didn't mess with his already pounding head. Clint sighed out in satisfaction. There were definite advantages to living with Tony Stark, and Clint was going to miss them all.

"Clint," Cap said with that particular, diplomatic, Team-Leader tone. Clint actually didn't mind that tone coming from Cap, but he kept it a secret so he wouldn't trash his rep. Also, he thought the concussion might be finally catching up to him. "I know that you've said that the SHIELD missions weren't a problem, but--"

"Relax, man," Clint slurred. "I quit, so no more strike team mission fuck-ups." He opened his eyes and smiled at the surprise on Cap's face. "Only Avenger mission fuck-ups now."

"You… quit?" Natasha's voice was even, and the hesitation was barely anything, but Clint knew all the millions of questions and concerns that millisecond contained.

"Are you sure?" Cap wasn't even trying to be subtle. "I know I've had issues with how they use you but don't take that as an us-or-them ultimatum."

"Yeah, I quit; and yeah, I'm sure; and no, it didn't have anything to do with you, Cap." Clint leaned his head back against the (so nicely padded) seat and closed his eyes. "I'm only gonna be able to say this once, and everybody needs to hear it, so round 'em up, Tash. Okay?"

That shut them up for the rest of the flight. Clint might have even dozed off for a couple of minutes, but he was still worn clear down as they landed. Natasha stayed close, but he made it down and onto the common floor under his own power. He probably should have had somebody give a head's up on his face and all, because he wasn't even a step out of the elevator before Tony was yelling, "For fuck's sake, Legolas," and the room erupted.

"Oh, Clint," Pepper said softly, under all noise, and she was the one he was really sorry about surprising. It bothered her, seeing them battered and bruised after a fight. It'd taken Clint a long time to accept that he was in the circle of people she gave a damn about, but she'd finally managed to convince him. He tried not to give her anything more to worry about, but he wasn't very good at it.

"It's not as bad as--"

"If you're going to tell me it's not as bad as it looks, I will make you go get your own ice cream." She had a theory that ice cream was better than ice packs; Clint was her favorite test subject. Never in a million years had Clint thought he'd have an in-joke with someone like Pepper Potts, but there they were.

"Okay," Clint said, carefully not smiling and re-splitting his lip. "If you put it that way…"

"I do." Pepper led him to the oversized couch, but if he sat down there, he'd never get back up and he had about five minutes before the feral, wild part of him needed to be alone, to go to ground. She must have understood somehow--maybe years of wrangling Stark or possibly some mind meld going with Nat--because she let him ease into a straightback chair before she hurried off toward the kitchen. It was a well-disguised retreat, but Clint would never let her know he knew.

"Okay," Cap said. "Tell us what we need to know so you can stand down."

"Yeah," Clint sighed. "I quit. SHIELD." He steeled himself for the next part, because he wasn't sure he could actually make himself say the words. "Because…" He took a deep breath and pushed the words out. "Because Coulson's alive and has been all along."

The room went dead silent at that, nobody really even breathing for a split second; and Clint wasn't proud of it, but he couldn't not watch everyone for their reaction, couldn't not judge against everything he knew about the people in this room to see if someone, anyone, might have known. Bruce processed it fast and was watching Clint with that deep well of compassion he carried with him. Natasha was utterly still, but composed, the Black Widow at her most dangerous; Cap and Stark frozen. The silence shattered as Tony threw the glass he'd been holding against the wall, and a wave of questions hit Clint full force, but it was Pepper, once again, whose voice cut through the noise.

"Say that again," she commanded, but then when Clint opened his mouth to obey, she waved him off. "No, no, I heard you." She was as white as a sheet, but, as she spun on her heel and started firing off orders to JARVIS to rearrange her schedule, Clint realized it was because she was furious, pure and icy and raging. Some of the stuff coming out of her mouth actually raised Clint's own eyebrows.

"Clint," Natasha said, still with that unnatural calm. "How?"

"I don't know," Clint told her. "He's got a team--Melinda May, some kids, I don't know." He told her the markings on the plane and then swallowed hard. "But I talked to him, and--"

"Okay," Bruce said. "I know we're all… upset, but Clint needs to rest and the rest of us--" He shrugged and looked over to where Tony had ten screens projected in the middle of the room and looked to be throwing all of JARVIS against what Clint really hoped was not SHIELD's main CPU. Still, Fury had to have figured the news wouldn't have gone over well. If he hadn't beefed up security, it wasn't Clint's concern. "We have some things that will keep us busy."

"Thanks, Doc," Clint said. He let Natasha and Bruce haul him to his feet and followed along behind them. Bruce waited while he showered--and Nat made sure he didn't drown--and then Bruce checked him over to see that he hadn't pushed himself too far. The last thing Clint remembered was Natasha curled behind him, her breath steady and regular even as she admitted, "I don't understand."

"Sure you do," Clint said. "He wanted out. Away." It was crashing down on him, finally. He'd held it all off, but now he was as close as he ever got to safe and he was shaking from it all. "From m--"

"Please, don't say that," Natasha said softly, more softly than he'd ever heard her. "I wish I could make you not believe it, too, but please, just don't say it."

"Okay." She was right--she wasn't going to get him not to believe it, but for her, Clint wouldn't say it. "Okay," he repeated, and let her even, calm breathing drag him down to where he could finally be done with the day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ::whispers:: happy ending, happy ending, promise I haven't forgotten


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Spoilers through _Agents of SHIELD_ 1.11 (The Magical Place)  & minor mentions to things that happened in the first few issues of _Hawkeye_.

"You know," Clint sighed, halfway across the loft before it registered that he wasn't alone this morning. "I gave you the damn keys so you could feed my dog, not so you could break in during the night."

"I don't need the keys to break in," Natasha answered, as calm as always. "Plus, we brought breakfast."

 _We_. Clint scrubbed his hand across his head--like that was going to make the headache he knew was about to be unleashed on him go away--and turned around to see Nat and--oh, _great_ \--Melinda May on his couch, feet up on the crate he used for a coffee table (hell, who was he kidding--it was more his dining table), with coffee and--

"Tell me those are not cronuts," Clint said, horrified. "Tell me you haven't fallen into the trendy food trap."

"More for us." Natasha shrugged. "He is disturbingly attached to classic baked goods--I almost lost him when he discovered the Krispy Kreme store in Atlanta," she added to May.

"They made the donuts _right there_ ," Clint said. "Took 'em right out of the grease and glazed 'em, and boom, right into the bag--it was the best thing about that entire month and you know it."

"Well," Natasha said, licking her fingers and reaching for another of the abominations, "I won't argue with you there." She smiled at him. "These are very good, though. And we promise not to tell anyone if you turn to the Dark Side and have one or two."

"Is there coffee?" Regardless of the choice of breakfast food, Nat's coffee was generally worth any hassle. 

"There will be by the time you shower and put some clothes on." Natasha eyed Clint's (admittedly, ratty and old) boxers like it was _his_ fault she and her evil friend had broken into his place and gotten an eyeful.

"You're lucky I was even wearing this much," Clint grumbled as he got himself turned around and aimed for the bathroom. 

"Oh, now that could have been interesting," he heard May say in a thoughtful voice, which was half terrifying and half the stuff of late-night, alone-time material. _Death wish much?_ Clint lectured himself and kept walking. 

Nat kept her word: Clint's old Mr. Coffee was just finishing its cycle when he walked back into the main room, still a little damp under his t-shirt and jeans and toweling off his hair. He took the mug she offered him silently and started in on it as fast as he could; he'd finally woken up enough to figure out there was something going on and the more caffeine he could get, the better. He didn't even mind the stupid, inbred donut thing. At least there had been sugar and butter involved in its creation--it couldn't be all bad.

"Okay," Clint said finally. "Talk."

Natasha and May looked at each other; Natasha arched one eyebrow at May and kept drinking her coffee. Clint was definitely getting the vibe that they'd been over this before.

"It's Coulson," May finally said. "He isn't doing well."

Clint waited for a few extra seconds to be sure he was in control. He'd shredded more than a few targets over the last few months in an effort to keep from blowing everything he'd worked for to hell and back; he wasn't going to lose it now. 

"And that's my problem, how?" he asked evenly, despite the automatic kick hearing the words gave him. 

"It's not," May answered. "Not unless you want it to be." 

"Yeah, and why would I want that?" Clint was holding his coffee mug tightly enough that his knuckles were white; he made himself relax even though he knew it was too late and there was no way other two had missed it. 

"You know why," Natasha said, sharp and implacable. "You just keep running away from it."

"Fuck you, Romanoff," Clint snarled, but she was right and they all knew it, so much so that she didn't even bother responding.

May carefully put her own mug down on the table and said, "He's ignoring me thoroughly; there's something not right between him and Fury; and there isn't anyone else I know of that he's ever listened to."

Clint took everything that was bouncing around his brain and shoved it all down and away, at least enough that he could say, "That was a long time ago. Things are really fucking different now." 

"He tracks every mention of you, official or not," May said. "He doesn't think anyone notices, but he's sent Fury detailed oversight assessments for every handler you've worked with since the Chitauri. If we still used tape, he'd have worn your mission feeds to ribbons with how many times he's reviewed them."

 _He let me think he was dead_ , Clint thought, but didn't say. He didn't really need to, though. It was the elephant in the pink tutu dancing all across his room and for a couple of seconds, Clint seriously hated Natasha and May for bringing it into this place he'd carved out for himself. Throwing a tantrum wasn't going to help, though, so he braced both forearms on his thighs and stared at the floor, letting it all go as best he could. 

"He knows I'm here," May added. "He told me he couldn't believe that you'd hear me out, but he didn't try to stop me."

Clint turned his head and looked at Natasha. She looked back at him steadily. "I think you need to do this. For you."

"I'm fine, Nat." 

"You could be better." Natasha didn't snap at him this time, instead going for the big guns and smiling at him. She had a lot of smiles, but this was the one she saved for Clint and he wasn't too proud to admit it could rock his world. "You deserve for it to be better."

Clint went back to studying the floor. After a long few minutes of silence, May said, "I had no idea you didn't know he was alive." Clint closed his eyes, retreated into his head. "You're Level 7, both of you. I assumed you and he had split--to be honest, given how he monitored you, I thought you were the one who'd walked away."

"Yeah, no," Clint managed to say. "Fuck, no."

"He came to me, told me he was putting a team together, that we'd have complete autonomy. No one looking over our shoulders, no armchair quarterbacking." There was the slightest edge in May's voice, which Clint counted as a sign of the impending apocalypse. "He did it, too--you know how he is--but it was different than what I expected. And now..." Clint made himself pay attention; Melinda May didn't ask for help lightly or easily. "Maybe ten agents in SHIELD would notice how off his game he is, but it's there. Things are happening and I don't know if the team can deal with them with him not at a hundred percent."

From anyone else, it would have been dirty pool, bringing in the team like that. It didn't matter if he knew them or not, Clint would walk through literal fire to get to agents on the ground and May knew it. Hell, she'd been right there next to him once or twice. She wasn't manipulating him, though. That wasn't her M.O. If she was saying it, it was the reality of the situation and Clint was finding that whether or not he was officially still SHIELD, he couldn't turn his back.

"For the record, this really isn't going to work," Clint sighed. "But let's get it on the road."

May had the class not to crow about it, and Natasha only looked marginally self-satisfied, so Clint took his wins where he could and made sure Lucky knew he'd be back. He knew it was more for his own peace of mind than it was for Lucky, but whatever worked, worked. Nat was happy enough with Clint going that she volunteered to take Lucky to the park later, which meant there'd probably also be a side trip to see Lucky's lady dog friend, because it turned out the Black Widow was a sap for dogs in love. Clint usually tried to keep things a bit more under control, but so long as there weren't babies, he guessed he was fine with Lucky getting a little on the side. 

All canine distractions aside, Clint followed May to an anonymous van parked on the street, one that was impressively tricked-out on the inside. 

"Coulson always did get all the best toys." The words were out before Clint even realized he'd been thinking them, and it was pretty damn humiliating how easily his brain let Phil back in after all the months Clint had spent rooting him out.

"The bus is one of a kind," May said and then they were quiet for a while. 

Finally, Clint asked, "Give me the run-down?" like it was any other op he and May were running. If he thought of it like that, he might be able to get through it all without losing what was left of his mind. "You said it wasn't what you expected."

"He's been different, right from the start," May said. "More at ease. Lost the…"

"Lost the stick up his ass?" Clint offered. Clint might have been completely gone on the guy, but that didn't mean he couldn't see him clearly. 

"I was going to say he lost his intolerance for imperfection, but that works." May shrugged. "It's a new team; you know how that goes, but… it's also not what I expected from one of his teams. Better in a lot of ways but less structured."

Clint knew what she meant; Delta had been exactly like that, but they'd kept it between the three of them. 

"That's not your issue, though," he said.

"No," May answered. "I just wanted you to understand where we started from. We had the situation with you, and then a little while ago, we had a complete clusterfuck of an op--hostages in play, agents compromised, the whole nine yards. Coulson was taken."

Clint couldn't help it, his blood ran cold. 

"We got him back, but we were unstrapping him from some _thing_ hooked to his brain." 

"Shit," Clint sighed. 

"No. Worse." May was as blunt as ever. "He'd already started withdrawing after we ran into you and whatever actually happened when they had him pushed it into overdrive."

"Got it," Clint said. He still didn't know why she and Natasha thought he was going to be able to help, but they were coming up on the plane and fuck if Clint was going to back down now. 

"Barton," May said as she parked the van in the cargo hold. "I didn't want this team, but I have them now and I will do whatever it takes to hold them together." Clint nodded and she pointed him toward a closed door in the midsection of the plane and left him to it.

Clint stood there for longer than he was proud of, but when he finally steeled himself and started to move, it was easier than he expected to knock and open the door on the heels of the muffled _Come_ from inside. Momentum carried him in, and then Phil was there behind his desk, looking up at Clint and surprised enough not to keep from showing it, and it turned out Clint really could stand there and not feel like he was being torn in two. 

"I--" Phil hesitated, swallowing hard, but then he pulled himself together and finished, "I wasn't expecting it to be you."

"Yeah, Melinda said." Clint closed the door behind him. He looked Phil over critically and decided May was right: there was definitely something off, but the signs were subtle enough that most people would sail right by. "She also said you weren't dealing with shit."

Phil glanced down at the laptop on the desk in front of him, but didn't use it to deflect, only closed it and left his hands resting on the top. "I suppose when you've pushed Melinda May into calling for help, it's time to admit there's a problem."

"You said it, not me." Clint wasn't sure if he was happier not to have to hassle Phil into talking or more worried because Phil was already on that breaking point. 

"You don't need to do this," Phil said. 

"Yeah," Clint sighed, thinking about all the things Nat had been telling him over the last couple of months. "I kinda do." 

Phil kept his eyes on his hands and didn't say anything. Clint waited him out. Everyone--including Clint--always thought that Clint was the one who didn't deal well with being pushed--which was true--but Clint had gained enough distance to recognize that maybe the reason Phil had been so good at not pushing Clint was that he disliked it just as much. 

Finally, Phil said, so quietly that Clint would have missed it if he hadn't been tuned completely on Phil, "I haven't said this to anyone, not all of it."

"Okay," Clint answered. He stayed still and let Phil set the pace; if he'd learned anything useful out of the whole Loki-shitshow, it was how much easier it was to get through things when the person who happened to be in the room with you as all the internalized crap started to spill out didn't try to manage the process. 

"I felt… wrong," Phil said finally. "Right from the start, from when I first woke up." He glanced up at Clint, but only for the briefest of moments, and then his gaze skittered around the small room. Clint knew how that worked--when your brain was screaming _Danger, Will Robinson_ at you, it was hard to know where to look. 

"My mind--" Phil said. "It didn't _fit_. The things I was remembering, they were wrong. Flat." 

Clint nodded and hoped like hell his body language was saying all the right things, like he was there and listening and not that he was screaming curses at himself and Loki and everything that had put Phil in that position to start.

"It was almost easier with my body--that should feel wrong, I thought. I remember being stabbed, remember Nick talking to me." Clint made extra sure to stay loose and easy; he didn't need to throw Phil off with his own twitches and tells. "Nothing was right, but everyone kept telling me I was fine."

Phil looked at Clint then, meeting his eyes for the first time. "They were lying to me. All of them: the doctors, Fury, Maria… I knew it but I couldn't--" He stopped for a few seconds and when he started again, his voice was flat and unemotional. "I couldn't even sit up at that point, not without help. So, I laid there and I played along with them and I tried to work it out."

Clint almost wanted to laugh--of _course_ Phil had been trying to work it out even though he was half-dead from going up against a demi-god, of course he had--except for how it really wasn't funny at all.

"I told myself not to eliminate any possible scenarios, and God knows I had plenty of time, so I had these lists--in my head, of course, I couldn't hold a pencil at first. Alternate reality, time loop, Strange and his theories, some of the odder things we've heard rumors of in Latveria… Like I said, I had a lot of time on my hands." Phil shrugged. "In the end, I went with the simplest solution: the neural transplant Life Model Decoy R&D has been working on."

"Okay, wait," Clint said slowly. "Your medical directive--a neural transplant into an LMD definitely falls under extreme measures and those were off the table." They'd held each others medical power of attorney; Clint knew Phil's wishes as well as he'd known his own.

"Do you really think that would matter given the opportunity my circumstances presented?" Phil was calm, but his eyes held an awareness that was cold and bleak. "I was there, on the 'carrier. They knew to the second when my heart stopped. I was talking to Nick when it happened; they could judge my level of brain injury from the security feeds. They could manage everything and if I didn't make it, well, I was already dead."

"Phil--"

"Tell me that couldn't happen."

As much as Clint wanted to, he'd seen too many things spiral out of control. They walked a razor's edge at SHIELD and sometimes, things didn't always come down on the side of the angels. Phil nodded grimly at his silence. 

"I spent a good amount of time trying to decide what to do about it," Phil said, his words seeming to come more easily now. Clint knew that, too, the relief of finally getting the first bit out of your head. "I always thought I'd have the strength of mind not to tolerate something so… so abhorrent, but it turns out I didn't have the courage to end it--"

"Ah, Christ, _Phil_ ," Clint couldn't bite back the curses that flowed at the thought of Phil being driven that far. Phil let him go on without any sign of impatience, just waited him out, until Clint got himself back in control and nodded for Phil to continue.

"I worried them for awhile," Phil said. "I might not have had the guts to end it, but I didn't see how I could keep going." He looked down again, studying his hands. "That was when I told Nick not to tell you anything. I'd been watching you, the Avengers, your SHIELD missions. You were putting yourself back together--I couldn't--you didn't deserve to have to deal with the… with the _thing_ that's wearing my face."

Phil was braced for Clint's reaction, and it was clear he expected it to be bad. To be honest, Clint wasn't sure why he was just standing there, listening to how Phil had cut him out of the life they'd shared, except that maybe he'd gotten to the point where it just was. Yelling about it wasn't going to change that it happened and Clint was… he was _tired_ of it all. 

"And then?" Clint asked. Phil still wasn't looking at him so he let his head drop back against the wall and closed his eyes. 'Tired' didn't begin to cut it, he thought.

"I got stronger, and I… I decided that as long as I was pretending to be a real boy, I could try to do a little good." Phil had a bitter twist to his voice, one that Clint couldn't ever remember hearing before. "The doctors were falling all over themselves to get me engaged so I told them I wanted a team and full autonomy, mostly as an experiment to see how far I could push things."

"But you got it," Clint said, with a bitter twist of his own. "Bright, shiny new team." 

"Yes," Phil said quietly. "They're a good team, but they don't fit the standard operational metric." He hesitated, like he knew how that was what everyone always said about Natasha and Clint, about how there was no way Delta should have even worked, much less been SHIELD's top strike team. "My goal was to make it so that didn't matter." 

_Again_ , Clint's brain added, but that wasn't going to get them anywhere. Clint reminded himself that he'd known this was going to be a right fucking mess from the start and he'd agreed to it anyway. So, go him for reading the tea leaves right, and he still wasn't done. "May said there was a clusterfuck of an op?" 

"There's a group we've been tracking," Phil said. "They wanted me, wanted to know how I was still here. They had a device that could break through memory programming, and I thought… Well, I thought I didn't know what had happened either and my records were locked down, so why not?"

"Okay," Clint said after a couple of seconds where he was so pissed off he seriously couldn't remember how to form words. "For the record? We are now _completely_ even in really fucking _stupid_ stunts to pull on an op. Jesus, Coulson, you let them _into your brain?_

"Not at first," Phil said. "But yes, after some time, I did."

"Fucking hell," Clint muttered. Nat was going to go ballistic when Clint told her.

"Getting through the blocks seemed worth the risk," Phil said. 

"Was it?" Clint snapped. "Because from where I'm sitting, one neurologically-compromised agent to another, it really fucking doesn't."

"It--" Phil always chose his words carefully, but he usually did it so smoothly no one could tell. This time he seemed to be at a loss. "I did break through the initial layer of false memories and I've received independent corroboration of the layer that was exposed…"

"But," Clint supplied.

"But the corroboration has come from the same players who orchestrated the top layer."

"Of course." Clint scrubbed his hand hard over his head. He might have called that this was going to suck but that didn't make it any easier to hear. "Because anything else would have been too simple and we can't be having simple."

"There is that clause in all the SHIELD contracts," Phil said. The familiar dry humor and how long it had been since he'd heard it was like a knife in Clint's gut, but he didn't guess it mattered all that much since it was gone in the next second. "That's where I stand now." Phil shrugged. "I thought I was dealing with it, but apparently not as well as I'd hoped." 

He started making moves like he was going to open his laptop and go back to work, like he thought Clint was going to buy that he wasn't eating himself alive with the not knowing. He was even looking at Clint with that _Thank you, agent; we're done here_ expression he used on all the baby agents; Clint definitely got why May had come to get him. He was actually kinda impressed she hadn't just slapped Phil into next week. It wouldn't have done much good, which she probably knew, but it must have been mighty tempting even so. 

"No," Clint said, taking a deep breath, because there was only one thing he could think of and he wasn't sure how well it was going to fly. He couldn't not try, though, and he wasn't even pretending it was for Coulson's team. He'd just have to deal with that later, which he was getting pretty damn good at doing. "You're not even close to dealing with it and you're gonna get your team in deep shit."

"I'm--"

"Don't bother, Coulson." Clint might not quite have Natasha's death glare, but he knew he had enough of his own Seriously Unimpressed face to get his point across. "You're not. You know it and I know it. Your kids might not have figured it out, but May has, so I'm guessing it won't be long for the rest of it to hit the fan."

Phil didn't say anything, which was an answer enough in itself. Clint plowed on. "The question is: what are you going to do about it?"

"What would you suggest?" Phil snapped, and _good_ , Clint thought. At least it was a reaction. "My memories are most definitely compromised and the only people who know what happened are the ones who compromised them _and_ who are giving me orders. Add in that they're very nearly the only people who have the capabilities to even detect what happened and where does that leave me? I could go hand myself over to Centipede again, but I doubt my time with them would end happily, even if they aren't manipulating my brain as well."

Phil was glaring at Clint by the time he was through; Clint didn't even have to force the smile onto his face. 

"Do you trust me?" he asked Phil. "Me. Not SHIELD, 'cause I walked on them six months ago."

"Clint, I--"

"Do you?" Clint wasn't smiling now, because it all hinged on this and he was afraid he knew the answer.

"Yes," Phil answered. "Of course."

"Good," Clint managed to say through his heart pounding like he'd run a marathon. "Yeah, okay, good, because I've got an idea and we need to move on it now." He opened the door to the office and looked back at Phil expectantly. As soon as Phil stood up to join him, he flipped on the intercom and called up to the cockpit. "Hey, Melinda, I'm borrowing Coulson for the afternoon. Call the Tower if you need us." 

"Place nice, boys," May answered. "Keys are in the van."

That was good, because Clint didn't think he was up for dealing with the memories that came along with Lola. He purposefully didn't look at Phil as they got in the van; he didn't know whether it'd be worse to know that Phil was in the same place or find out that he wasn't. One thing at a time, and the next thing was going to be tricky enough as it was. He didn't need to throw all his baggage out there to be dragged along behind him. 

Phil let Clint drive, not even blinking when Clint started steering with his elbows while he hunted down his phone and put the call through to Pepper's private number. 

"Got a favor to ask," Clint said when she came on the line. "A big one."

"Ask away," Pepper said immediately. Clint could tell she was in the thick of her day, but he'd never called before and he could tell she'd already picked up on that.

"I'm on my way to the Tower with Coulson--"

" _Clint_ ," Pepper said, frowning. She could get almost as much across in a single word as Natasha could and none of it was good this time.

"I know," Clint answered. "I know." She kept the frown but she didn't say anything more, so Clint went on, "I'm gonna need JARVIS to put on his medical hat and I figured you'd at least hear me out on this."

"I'm listening, but I don't understand at all why we need to be involved."

"Because there is a chance that we have an unauthorized, experimental use of a neural implant into the cutting-edge Stark LMD." Clint didn't add, _And I know how you feel about unauthorized human experimentation_ , but he didn't have to. 

"Define 'a chance.'" Pepper's eyes had gone hard and flat. Clint hated that he was the one who'd triggered all those memories this time, but he also knew she'd be pissed if he'd bypassed her because he didn't want to upset her.

"Nothing for sure, but… there are definitely non-trivial reasons to suspect it." Clint very carefully did not look at Phil. "JARVIS is about the only diagnostic I can trust with this."

Pepper closed her eyes for a long few seconds, and then nodded once and said, "I'll put the proper authorizations in place. You should be clear by the time you get to the Tower. Keep me in the loop on this, though."

"Thanks." Clint let the breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding trickle out. "I owe you one."

"No," Pepper said. "I think that's still tilted to my owing you, but we can talk about that the next time you make it to dinner."

The screen went black and left Clint in a car where the silence was awkward and building rapidly toward screamingly uncomfortable. He spared a thought for all the years--decades, really--when he and Phil had been able to spend hours on opposite ends of a comm link with an ease that Clint had never found with anyone else, but that was another lifetime and for right now, he told his brain to quit with the used-to-be's.

Pepper was as good as her word: by the time Clint got them to the parking deck at the Tower, JARVIS had a suite of locked-down medical rooms waiting for them. Even better, Bruce met them as they stepped onto the floor.

"Pepper thought it might be better if there was someone to manage the process here on the ground," Bruce said in that quiet way he had. "If you'd rather not have me involved--"

"No," Phil said. "It's--If you don't have objections to being here, I'm fine. I don't want to cause any friction, though."

"It's not a problem," Bruce said. "Pepper's on board and if we call it medical buddies, Steve will back us to the hilt." 

Clint tried not to look like he was going to fall over with relief, but he hadn't realized until he'd seen Bruce just how uncomfortable he'd been at the thought of going through this alone. Bruce took charge, shepherding them into the main room and going down the list of tests JARVIS was going to run. It had been his idea, so Clint hung around in the background. Phil didn't seem to have a problem with it, not even when things got personal and he was describing the different memories he had. 

"Even now," Phil told Bruce, "I have a difficult time not replying to mentions of Tahiti with the pre-programmed response." He stopped then, his jaw bunching and flexing as though he was forcibly not saying something. Clint found himself wishing for a bow and an explosive arrow or ten. Phil took a long breath and continued, "The surgery memory, the one that's supposedly true, is very patchy. I remember pain, mostly. Helplessness. Despair. Wanting to die."

Clint must have made a noise at that because Bruce's eyes flicked over to him. He got it together, though, fast enough that Bruce didn't follow through with suggesting it might be better if Clint left. It probably wasn't a bad idea--the Loki parallels were staring them all in the face--but Clint wasn't known for smart ideas and he didn't see where this was any place to start. 

They stopped talking about things after that anyway, and got on with what was more-or-less an in-depth physical. Phil was definitely more twitchy with that than he used to be, but Bruce understood and Clint stayed around and they all managed to get through it. Bruce drew blood and did a couple of DNA swabs. The only other thing that got to Clint was when they hooked Phil up so he could do a stress test on the treadmill and there was no way to avoid seeing the scars. 

"For a while," Phil said breathlessly, "I tried to convince myself that they were proof that this was my body, but that's not necessarily true."

Bruce murmured something too soft for Clint to hear, but Phil nodded and they increased his pace. Everything went fine until they were down to the last part, the augmented MRI of Phil's brain. They started off okay, but twice, after about ten minutes, Bruce had to have JARVIS cancel because Phil was unable to keep still.

"Claustrophobic?" Bruce asked Clint.

"Not that I know of," Clint answered. They were in the observation room off to the side, so he didn't feel like he had to keep the frustration of seeing Phil dancing around a panic attack out of his voice. "I'd have said 'no way' -- I've seen him in some pretty tight spots, but it's been awhile."

Bruce nodded thoughtfully, and then keyed on the intercom. "Agent Coulson?" he said. "This isn't strictly necessary, so if you'd like to skip it, we can go on."

"I'd like to have this done," Phil said. Even over the crappy speakers, Clint could hear how uneven Phil sounded. "I'm just having some difficulty keeping my focus in the here-and-now."

"Would it help if we talked you through it?" Bruce asked. "You wouldn't be able to answer, but it might help keep you grounded."

"It's at least worth a try," Phil said. They got set back up again, and Bruce nodded to Clint and they were off. 

"So, yeah," Clint said. "No surprise that I'm the designated talker, I guess." He cast about for something to say and decided to just go with life as it was now. "I, uh, don't know if you know that I finally got my own place. It's nothing big, you know, just an old building in BedStuy, but it's pretty okay." Bruce, studying the monitors, gave him a thumbs up, so Clint kept on talking. He told Phil about Lucky and grilling out on the roof, and how Nat waltzed in and out whenever she felt like it. He left out the part with the Russian mob since he hadn't mentioned any of that to the rest of the team yet; and bringing up Jess carried its own battery of land mines, so he left that part out, too. "Stark came and insulted my couch, but he got all the electronics wired up. Bruce doesn't get out much, but he makes a mean curry so I end up back here a lot." They made it past the ten-minute mark without so much as a twitch. "And, okay, you can't move, so I'm warning you not to laugh, but your hero, Captain America? Yeah, it turns out the guy is a putterer. His word, not mine, just sayin'. He comes over to watch the game, he says, but it's really just so he can wander around and fix shit. Not that I'm complaining, but it's a little weird when I think that my leaky faucet got taken care of by a living icon."

Bruce added a little here and there, but mostly it was Clint monologuing for the 45 minutes it took to get the full test. His voice was a little ragged by the end, but they got a clean scan to compare to a baseline one done back when Phil was still in the Rangers (his SHIELD records might be locked down but his military ones were free and clear and JARVIS had already gotten hold of them) so it was definitely worth it. 

JARVIS was fast, too--Phil was still getting dressed when Clint and Bruce got pinged to the main monitor bank.

"As Agent Barton is still listed as holding Agent Coulson's medical powers-of-attorney, I am taking the liberty of discussing with you how best to communicate my findings with him," JARVIS said. 

Bruce walked Clint through the different tests, from the blood-type-matching through to the MRI. Clint looked at everything again, and then said, "So, bottom line, Coulson is Coulson, no LMD."

"Most definitely," JARVIS said.

"And the memories?" Clint knew what the answer had to be, but he wanted to hear it out loud.

"Though we can't, of course, be certain of the exact memories, this most recent MRI shows scarring and regenerative growth consistent with extensive brain surgeries." JARVIS never sounded more human than when he had news that pushed the edge of that humanity.

"So, no LMD, at least," Bruce said, but his eyes were as tired and full of bad memories as Clint had ever seen. "That's something."

"I guess," Clint said, and went to go deliver the news that the part about living through unanesthetized brain surgery looked like it was true.

Phil took it quietly, but Clint swore he could see the lines around Phil's eyes and mouth deepen before he turned away to the mirror to tie his tie.

"It's best to know the truth," Phil said after a few seconds. 

"It'd be better if none of this shit ever happened in the first place," Clint snarled. 

"It is what it is," Phil said, turning around. Clint thought he might have been reaching out to touch Clint, like he had a thousand times in the past, but then he caught himself and they were back to staring across a room at each other in the pretty goddamn shitty present.

"Yeah, it is," Clint sighed. "Look, I can drive you back--"

"No, I'm fine to drive myself," Phil said, which, given the day he'd had, was just all kinds of stupid to Clint's way of thinking, but before he could dig his heels in for the fight, they walked into the elevator lobby that was somehow full of people and Phil stopped so suddenly Clint nearly knocked him down.

"Yo, boss," said the kid from the dungeons. The rest of the crowd looked up at that and Clint slotted them all into the places Natasha had ID'd for him after everything had blown wide open: Ward, leaning against the wall; the kid, Skye, perched on the window ledge; the inseparable science geeks hovering over one of JARVIS's projection. When Clint looked at Phil, something in his expression had eased, enough that Clint found himself relaxing a little, too. "Nice digs," Skye said.

"Skye," Phil said in that tone that was all why-me on the surface but held all kinds of affection just out of sight. It had always amazed Clint that so few people could hear it, but from how Skye was smirking at Phil, he could tell she got it, loud and clear. Despite everything, Clint found himself glad for it. "Really? You felt it necessary to not only come after me but bring the entire team as well?"

"Sir--" Ward started.

"Hey, May stayed to take care of the Bus," Skye said, coming over to link her arm into Phil's. "And, we were, y'know, practicing our cross-team coordination: Ward drove because of some arcane protocol that makes sense only to government spooks; I'm here to handle the talking-to-people part; Simmons came in case we needed medical back-up."

"And Fitz?"

"C'mon, AC, we couldn't leave him behind on a field trip to _Stark Tower_." She grinned up at Phil. "Can you imagine the sad-puppy eyes?"

"Sad-puppy eyes?" Phil said. "I've yet to be briefed on this condition." 

"Sir," Ward said again, a little desperately, Clint thought. "About the team, I can explain--"

"I'm sure it will be fascinating," Phil said, going to talk to him. Skye stayed back and looked Clint up and down. 

"Definitely better without your face beaten in."

"Yeah, I like it this way, too." 

Skye stepped closer and asked quietly, "He's okay?"

"Physically, yeah," Clint told her, nodding over to Bruce. "Tell your not-doctor to talk to our not-doctor if you want something a little more official, but, yeah, we got some things sorted out. The rest of it is his to tell or not."

"Cool," Skye said on a long, drawn-out sigh. "It was not pretty when we found him and he's been all in deny-deny-deny mode ever since."

"Yeah, he does that," Clint said. "He kinda wrote the book on it." Phil was moving everyone toward the door by then, so Clint dropped his voice and added, "Don't let him." Skye nodded to him and let herself be shooed into the elevator with the rest of them. To Clint's surprise, instead of just using the overall momentum as an excuse to keep moving, Phil stopped in front of him. 

"Thanks for trusting me," Clint said.

"I think I'm the one who should be offering my thanks," Phil said, giving Clint the mid-level, quizzical eyebrow arch when he shrugged. "So, yes--thank you."

He did touch Clint this time, a quick brush across Clint's shoulder, and then he was on the elevator and the doors closed. Clint stayed where he was for a couple of seconds, the adrenaline of the day slowly starting to fade.

"Dinner?" Bruce asked from behind Clint. "Nothing special, but JARVIS did get a delivery of spices in from the greenmarket, so I think I can manage something at least a little interesting."

"Yeah," Clint said, turning away from the elevator and letting Bruce get a look at him. Bruce smiled at him, so Clint guessed he didn't look too bad. He was really freaking tired, though. If it had been anyone else, Clint would have already been out of there, but Bruce never pushed and Clint didn't really want to be alone with everything that was bouncing around his head. "That'd be good, thanks. I'm probably going to be shit for company, though."

"I'm sure you'll return the favor before too long," Bruce answered. It was true enough, so Clint just followed along and let Bruce feed him curry and tea and tried not to think about Phil and where they were for the rest of the night. He didn't do too good with the last part, but Lucky was waiting for him at home and Nat would kick the shit out of him on the mats the next day. Life would keep going on and Clint was finally in a place where that was pretty okay. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ::falls over DEAD::
> 
> I knew this was going to be hard to write, but eesh, it took forever. Thank you for all the comments and kudos--they are so lovely to see. 
> 
> Also, I should probably note that I tend to just skip around canon and take what I want; apparently, my brain decided we needed some of Fraction's _Hawkeye_ while I was plotting this part out, so that's in the mix now, too. I realize that a lot of people like to keep the MCU separate from 616  & Ultimates, but I've been reading comics for a ridiculous number of years now and I really can't keep all the different canons from mushing together in my brain. I'm sorry if it's throwing any of you off, but when I write, there's no telling which bit is going to come tumbling out of my subconscious.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Spoilers for things that happened in _Hawkeye_ #4/#5.

Somehow, Clint ended up hanging out with Cap in DC. Not just once or twice, but a lot. New York was great and all--somehow it'd even become home--but sometimes it was good to get a change of scenery, and even though he'd spent a fair amount of time in the area during his stint with SHIELD, that had been business and this was purely down-time. Cap always apologized for still being in catch-up mode and wanting to do touristy things, but it wasn't like walking down the Mall with Captain America to see the actual flag that had inspired the national anthem was a hardship or anything.

Clint felt a little bad about the entire afternoon he spent geeking out over the Blackbird and Shuttle on display at the the Air and Space Museum (he might or might not have broken twenty or thirty different rules when he crawled under them so he could let their awesomeness totally fill his field of view, but Cap had smiled that impossible smile at everyone who came to yell at them, and nobody had gotten arrested. Katie always said, 'Pics or it didn't happen' and Clint felt that he could extend that to incident reports, too.) Cap told him to count it as payback against the time Clint had waited around while he'd sat on the floor in front of the Matisse cut-outs for the entire time they'd been open to the public that day.

So, yeah, he and Captain America were museum-buddies, which was not a thing Clint had ever thought he'd be saying, especially since he didn't actually do museums.

He blamed Natasha.

To be fair, Cap did, too. They'd worked out how she set them up while eating their way through a bushel of steamed hard-shells at this dive Clint remembered from the old days. (It was always a trip to see how much food Cap could put away, but they were all mostly used to it. Even so, Clint'd felt it was necessary to commemorate that particular time in blast texts with pictures attached, if only because the pile of shells and gunk on the table once they were through was pretty ridiculous. Clint contributed more than his own fair share, enough that his fingertips were on fire from where the salt on the Old Bay had mixed with his permanently torn-up cuticles, but it was still mostly Cap and it deserved to be memorialized.) When they got back to Manhattan and asked Natasha point-blank, she just slanted them the look that said she was restraining herself from patting them on their heads and left to go offer support to Pepper on a shoe-shopping excursion that sounded more like emergency therapy.

"It's not that I mind having the company," Cap said after she was gone and it was only him and Clint out on the Tower's observation deck. "I, just..."

"Don't like feeling like you're an assignment?" Clint suggested. "Yeah, ditto." He shrugged. "For what it's worth, you're not. I mean, I don't mind having the company either."

"So, we're good?" Cap asked.

"Yeah, we're good."

Also, for what it was worth, Clint was glad to see Cap was as uncomfortable with feelings as the rest of them. It was always nice to get that confirmation that he wasn't perfect, if only to make Clint feel a tiny bit better about his own life.

Meeting up after Cap had to go glad-hand a bunch of politicians was especially fun; Cap was always strung-out and ready for any stupid idea Clint could throw out there. (Driving six hours to BASE-jump off a bridge in West Virginia had been especially epic. Clint was saving the buildering-a-monument idea for the next time there was Congressional testimony on the docket.) This trip wasn't one of those, though. Cap was in the District for SHIELD-related crap and then Clint was going with him to hit a round of military hospitals in the area. It was one of the things they did that the rest of the team never really understood. Nobody disapproved, but they didn't really get it, especially since it left both of Clint and Cap worn down to the bone. Clint wouldn't miss it, but by the time they finished, he knew they weren't going to be good for much but running themselves into the ground, until they were as physically tired as they were mentally and emotionally.

Working on that theory, Clint went against his rule to stay out of SHIELD-radius and picked an old favorite, a diner right down the Potomac from the Triskelion because it'd be easy to meet up there after Cap was done with SHIELD. Plus, its all-day breakfast was legendary. Fueling up on grits and country ham and red-eye gravy before they headed out sounded like the best plan for the day. Of course, plans and Clint being what they were (ie, not in the same reality), he and Cap had just finished eating when the door opened, letting in a blast of cold air, a group that was clearly from SHIELD--and Sitwell and Coulson.

The place could only seat twenty or thirty people--it wasn't like Clint could duck his head and hope he (and, oh yeah, _Captain America_ ) could fly under the radar. Plus, running into Phil was always going to happen at some point, so Clint reminded the part of his brain that was yelling _Abort! Abort! Abort!_ that he and Phil had interacted politely during the whole LMD-hunt (and then ignored the part about how they hadn't spoken since) and nodded a general hello to group. He had a couple of seconds where he thought that was as far as it was going to go (and he couldn't figure out if he was happy about that or not), but then Sitwell was on his way over and Phil was trailing along behind. He looked better, Clint thought. Less stressed, less worn-down. Clint hoped that meant he'd gotten past at least some of the shit they'd found out the last time.

"Sorry to interrupt," Sitwell was saying from what sounded like a mile away. Clint gave himself a mental shake and dragged his brain back to what was happening in time to hear Cap say, "Agent Coulson," all cool and disapproving, which was weird enough, but then Phil answered, "Captain Rogers," in what was his I-am-incredibly-disappointed-in-your-behavior voice (something with which Clint had gained more than a passing familiarity during his first few years at SHIELD but which he never would have believed could be directed toward Cap.) Sitwell honest-to-God rolled his eyes and Clint was very definitely missing something.

"I'll go take care of the check," Cap said after a couple of seconds of everyone staring at each other. He grabbed the slip out from under the sugar dispenser and walked off without another word. The rest of them went back to staring at each other.

"Glad to see you're out of Medical," Phil finally said to Clint. He didn't exactly smile, but his eyes did. "I'll get a table," he said to Sitwell, back to the disappointed tone, and stalked off.

"Okay," Clint said, dragging his eyes off Phil and looking back at Sitwell. "What the hell was that all about?"

"Holy shit, you haven't heard?"

"Out of the loop, Jasper," Clint answered. "Not officially official these days, remember?"

"Right, right," Sitwell said, an enormous grin spreading over his face. He always knew everything that was going on and there was nothing he loved as much as sharing that knowledge. Once, Clint had seen him passing along the latest news with a smile on his face while a triage team had been putting 50 stitches in a gash along his arm. "You know Coulson's been writing competency reviews for every poor S.O.B. who's gone out on an op with you, right?" Clint nodded. "So, apparently, after the whole cluster in Madripoor--which, I gotta say, nice job there and bonus points for giving Hill a stress migraine when that AmEx bill came in--he delivered his assessment in person."

"Ah, shit," Clint muttered. Madripoor had been a right fucking mess and the only reason he ended up unconscious in Medical instead of screaming his lungs out while he got tortured to death on a slab was that Kate Bishop was stupidly loyal and stubborn (and the absolute fucking best at what she did.)

"Oh, it was a thing of beauty." Sitwell's smile got a little dreamy, and seriously, Clint was sure it'd been awesome--Coulson could deliver a put-down with surgical precision--but that still didn't explain what had just happened here.

"Jasper!" Clint snapped his fingers. "Words, man."

"Right, right." Sitwell shook himself out of it. "It was classic Coulson--you know how he gets when he thinks everybody's playing a little too fast-and-loose with his people's lives." Clint managed to nod; he did know, first-hand, but it was kind of a gut punch, the way Sitwell so casually assumed that Clint was still one of Phil's people. "Yeah, well, he read Fury and Hill the riot act for not only losing the damn tape in the first place but then sending you in alone on the retrieval."

"And Cap… disapproved? He didn't like Coulson going up the chain of command like that?" Clint was grasping at straws, he knew that, but he was still missing something.

"No," Sitwell said slowly. "You really haven't heard _anything_ , have you? Rogers is pissed because after he finished with Fury and Hill, Phil went and found him and told him that shit like that was more-or-less normal for SHIELD, but that he'd always thought Captain America had a higher standard for looking out for the men under his command." Sitwell had lost the smile and was as serious as Clint had ever seen him. "Rogers came back with how Coulson was the last person to be talking about how to treat the people who worked for him and we're probably all lucky that May was there, too, and told them both to get the fuck over themselves before it got any worse."

It wasn't often that Clint couldn't think of something to say--really, the smart mouth defined him in so many ways it wasn't funny--but he didn't even know where to start.

"That's not why I came over, though," Sitwell said, evidently taking pity on Clint's inability to process and not waiting around for any kind of a response. "I didn't realize those two were still at it, but I--it's the first time I've seen you since, well, since I flipped out at you on the 'carrier last year and--" Sitwell sighed. "I owe you an apology. I'd basically just come from the briefing about Coulson being alive and I was… not dealing well."

"Yeah," Clint said. "Okay." It wasn't much of an answer--Sitwell deserved more because Clint couldn't think of too many guys who'd come back to apologize for something that had happened months before--but given that Clint was still trying to wrap his brain around Phil _yelling_ at Captain America, it was better than the nothing buzzing around his head. "We're good, man," he made himself add. He meant it, too; it wasn't hard at all to shake Sitwell's hand and send him off back to where Phil was studying the menu like he hadn't memorized it a decade ago.

"Everything all right?" Cap asked as Clint walked up to the register. Clint surprised himself and laughed.

"I couldn't even start to tell you, Cap." Clint shook his head. Cap wanted to press it, Clint could tell, but as much as he'd come to value having Captain America at his back, Clint was not going to let him set this agenda. "Let's go; there's never enough time as it is. We don't need to be cutting things short because I can't figure shit out. Again."

Clint got them out of the diner and aimed up toward Bethesda and the hospital. As usual, as soon as they walked in, they were swarmed with requests for visits. Cap took the brunt of it, especially with the vets from WWII, the guys who recognized him and claimed him for their own. He claimed them, too, and never left until he'd visited with every single one. Clint spent his time down on the PT floor this time, because, like he told everyone, he'd done more than his fair share of time on the mats and he figured he owed at least a couple dozen therapists for everything they'd put into getting him back out to where he could keep being an Avenger. Some day, Clint thought he might get past all the crap just being around all the equipment raised, but it wasn't now. By the time he hooked back up with Cap, it was probably good that Cap couldn't get drunk, because that had always been Clint's default way to deal, even when he knew it was a shitty idea. Instead, they ran a loop from the Lincoln Memorial to the Capitol and back, close to five miles before you counted the steps up to where Lincoln sat, which Clint really fucking did. After, Cap went to murder a few heavy bags and Clint…

Clint should have been listening to his legs, which were dead from keeping up with the Super Soldier and wanted nothing more than to rack out for the night, but instead found himself making his way back to the diner.

"I thought you might be back," Phil said. He was at their booth, the one that they'd sat in more times than Clint could begin to remember.

"I thought you might be here," Clint answered. He slid in on the opposite side and, only for a minute, let himself pretend the last year and a half hadn't happened, that this was nothing but him and Phil, grabbing a chance to be together like it had been for years, before they even started fucking.

Phil signaled to the waitress; she brought over some coffee and a club sandwich for Clint, and then faded back behind the front counter. Clint wrapped his hands around the thick white mug and let the warmth soak into him. He remembered being 25 and sitting in a random field hospital, still high as a kite from the uppers the Hand operatives had forced down his throat and babbling to Phil about how he hadn't ever been too sure about shooting for the Army but at least it meant he could eat every day. Phil hadn't laughed at him, or pitied him, or even so much as smiled, just listened and then the next day, when Clint was back on an even keel, he'd shown up and signed Clint out of Medical to take him off-base and feed him diner food, hot and greasy and full of salt. There hadn't been any blather about healthy meals or proper nutrition like Clint had been getting hit with nonstop since the medical types had gotten hold of him, nothing but pure comfort and no judgment. Clint thought that was maybe when he'd first started falling for Phil.

"So," Clint said. He shoved a quarter of the sandwich in his mouth and tried not to think about confessing that club sandwiches were so awesome-sounding, but so far out of their means when he'd been a kid that they'd been the first thing he went and got when he had money of his own. "We're here. Now what?"

"I suppose that depends on why you're here," Phil said.

"Yeah, why's it on me?"

"It's on you because…" Phil was choosing his words carefully and that--it just underlined how much everything had changed. It tired Clint out, exhausted him, far more than trucking around after Cap and giving as much of himself as he could to guys who'd lost the wrong-place/wrong-time lottery. "Well, because I'm not especially proud these days. I'll take whatever you'd like for me to have."

Of all the things Clint had thought he might hear, that hadn't even crossed his mind. He stared at Phil long enough that he probably looked like an idiot. Phil sat quietly, except for where he was digging the nail of his ring finger into the cuticle of his thumb, a tiny tic that Clint could only remember seeing once or twice in all the years they'd known each other.

"I understand that the life you have now may not have space for me, but--"

"Is that why you dropped off the radar?" Clint demanded. "You were waiting for, what? Me to invite you back?"

"Given that the only time we've interacted was the result of Natasha and Melinda forcing the issue, I didn't feel there was a basis for assuming I'd be welcome."

Phil said it straight-up, the way he'd always told Clint things, even things neither of them wanted to hear or say. Clint figured he owed Phil at least the same in return.

"It would've been nice to know that was what was going on." Clint decapitated the next quarter of his sandwich, eating down through the layers of toast and meat and cheese, saving the bacon for last. He considered what he wanted to say, or even if he wanted to say anything, but then decided they weren't getting anywhere without talking. "I didn't know if you were okay with everything we dug up last time."

"I'm still not sure that I am," Phil said quietly. "There have been some good things, and Melinda, at least, understands. I'm… better, but…"

"Yeah," Clint said. "Still a long way to go. I get it."

Phil nodded, the smallest of movements, but Clint read relief and something that was uncomfortably close to gratefulness in the movement. He'd stop and think about why that felt so wrong--or not, because, yeah, as advertised, he really didn't do well with feelings--but for right then, he just said the first thing that popped into his brain. "So, you decided to see how much currency that back-from-the-dead card brought you and went after Fury _and_ Cap?"

"I disagreed with the director," Phil said mildly. "It's hardly the first time and I doubt it will be the last."

Clint snorted. "Okay, I'll buy that, but Cap, too?" Phil flushed red and Clint couldn't help grinning. "I mean, I've watched the guy fight with Stark's coffee-machine-from-hell, so the magic's kind of gone for me--" That was true, and not, at the same time. Cap might be a real person in Clint's mind now, but he still really was Captain America and Clint never forgot it. "I didn't figure you were quite ready to lose the shine."

"It was probably past time I saw the person, not the myth," Phil said drily. "I survived. I--what I said needed to be said. I still feel that way." He shook his head. "This sounds paternalistic and condescending--I'm sorry about that--but I'd been telling myself that you'd be fine, you had a team now where you'd been working solo for so long before and then… I couldn't quite believe that no one seemed to see the ramifications of allowing anyone to believe that you--after everything with Loki--would be available for a mission like that."

"It was my call," Clint said. It was important that Phil know that, that he understand that Clint had weighed the odds before allowing himself to be videoed killing in cold blood, even if it had all been an act. It had done its job, protected the SEALs whose identities were at risk. "There was a tape like it with Cap, and one with Logan, too."

"Neither of whom are working their way out of what was, quite frankly, mind control on a level SHIELD has never dealt with before; neither of whom might feel it necessary to take risks to prove themselves worthy," Phil said. He met Clint's eyes squarely, no censure or pity. "That was the point I was trying to make with Captain Rogers. It, er, might have gotten lost in the shouting, but it was there to start. I understand that you volunteered and I understand why you did it, but I still think it was a poorly thought-out strategy from the top down, and that was _before_ they lost the tape. If I'd still been your handler, we would have had words about it." He smiled. "I'm sure you would have proceeded, regardless."

"And you would've enjoyed the 'I told you so' when the tape got stolen," Clint said. Getting that news had triggered no end of sick feelings; having Coulson there would have made it easier, even if he really would have been busting Clint's ass for ignoring the law that said how the worst thing anyone could imagine was usually how shit tended to play out.

"Of course," Phil answered. "I also would have been on the ground with you in Madripoor to get it back--I hope that goes without saying." Clint nodded once, jerky and short, because maybe he'd like to have thought that, but after everything he really couldn't be sure. Phil said it like he had never thought otherwise and Clint didn't know exactly how to follow it. The silence was a thousand times more comfortable than anything since Loki had blown his way into the lab and changed the world, though, which was maybe enough of an answer.

"They didn't just hang me out to dry," Clint said finally. "Hill came and got me and Kate.

"What they did or didn't do was very nearly moot," Phil answered. "Absent Ms. Bishop, I don't like to think how the scenario you were handed might have played out."

"Shit happens," Clint said with a shrug.

"Yes," Phil said. "Yes, it does, but I'd prefer that everyone stop and think a bit before they set it in motion."

"Thanks," Clint said. "You didn't have to--I mean, you've got your team to worry about now, but thanks."

"You're welcome," Phil answered. He drank the rest of his coffee and waited while Clint finished eating, not saying anything while they settled up the tab and made their way out onto the deserted sidewalk. Clint could go, walk down to the corner and catch a cab back to where he was crashing with Cap, and Phil wouldn't say anything more.

"You haven't ever met Katie, have you?" Clint said instead. Phil shook his head. "She's, fuck, she's even more of a kid than your kids, but she can shoot like you wouldn't believe. She doesn't let me get away with shit, either--you'd like her." Clint took a deep breath, but in the end it was easy to say, "You should look us up the next time you're near New York."

Phil stood very still for a second, and then he relaxed and smiled. "I'd like that very much," he said. He was still smiling as he turned and headed back toward the base, and Clint felt lighter somehow, like he'd suddenly laid down a pack of rocks he'd forgotten he'd even been carrying.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The timeline I've worked out isn't quite up to "T.A.H.I.T.I." on _Agents of SHIELD_ or _Hawkeye_ #15, so no spoilers for either of those here yet (or for that thing that happened at the end of the previous episode of AoS.) Otherwise, vague spoilers for other episodes/issues.

"Okay, seriously," Clint said as he aimed and shot, aimed and shot. Natasha was working her way around the edges of the open square that Clint was trying to clear, and there were at least a half-dozen agents pinned down in the building she was trying to get to. "What the hell does Budapest have against me?"

A muffled explosion distracted him, but only for a second, because they were already dancing way too close to the edge of a disaster for Clint not to be bringing his A-game.

"Aw, hell, that was the 'jet, wasn't it?" He heard the Hulk roar, so at least Bruce was okay, but Clint wasn't holding out much hope that it'd been a controlled change, which meant somebody was going to be on Hulk-tracking duty. And by somebody, he meant himself, since Tony and Cap were already engaged with the rest of the damn Latverian agitators and Thor was bringing the lightning down on anything that moved outside their base.

"I mean, I like Budapest as a city," Clint continued as he switched over to a bolo arrow to trip up the jackasses who thought they had a clear line to Natasha's blindside. "It's pretty, you know? Not like that hell-hole in…" The arrow hit perfectly--of course--and Tony's bolo deployed, exploding outward quickly enough that Clint could hear it singing as it cut through the air. The jackasses went down as neatly as if Clint had cut their legs off, without the mess of actually doing that. "...where was that hell-hole again, Widow?"

"You're going to have to narrow it down to at least a continent," Natasha said, drily. She sounded out of breath, which wasn't good, but she wasn't signaling for help, so Clint kept up with the plan.

"I don't guess it matters," he said. "My point was, I like Budapest, I don't talk smack about her, how come she doesn't like me?"

"Possibly because the only time you show up is when bad things are happening," Natasha answered. She was crouched behind a low wall. "And I hate to interrupt your deep pain, but can we pay attention to the problem on the ground here?"

"Work, work, work," Clint sighed. "Follow the yellow brick road, okay?" He put a line of marker darts down, feathering them along the easiest access he could see to the side entrance of the target building; Natasha ran with them, a split-second behind each hit. With anyone else, Clint would have worried about how close they were cutting it, but with Nat, he nocked, drew and fired as quickly as he could because she'd kick his ass if he implied she might get in the way.

Just to be a smart ass (it never hurt his street cred to be seen teasing the Black Widow, even if she'd probably smack him into a wall or two in retribution), he put a final dart right in front of the door. "Didn't want you to get lost at the last second, Widow," he said and laughed at her exasperated _tsk_.

There wasn't much to laugh about otherwise, though. He and Natasha had peeled off from the rest of the team to try and get to the agents pinned down, but with the 'jet gone, they had pretty much gotten themselves invited to the party without cab fare home. Clint had the high ground, true, but he could see the Latverian teams they'd blasted through regrouping already and he was pretty sure he wasn't going to be able to clear a path all the way back across the city.

"Really," he muttered as he tried to remember if there were any subway tunnels--or, hell, at this point, he'd take catacombs or a medieval sewer system--that they could use. "I _like_ Budapest."

"Given the truly ridiculous nature of most of the scenarios you've had play out in the city and how you haven't ended up splattered across a half-dozen rooftops, I'd say that she likes you back," an unexpected, but familiar voice said.

"Holy shit, Coulson, please tell me May and the bus are with you, because we could damn sure use a little extraction assist right about now." Clint was grinning like an idiot, he knew, but he didn't even care if someone saw him.

"The bus is on the way," May said, and Phil added, "We need to do a little bit more to clear the area for extraction."

"On it, sir," another voice--Ward, Clint thought--said, and on a roof on the other side of the square, someone with a pulse rifle and pretty decent aim on started giving Clint a hand in keeping the shock troops on the ground away from Nat and the pinned-down agents.

Clint left the extraction-planning to Nat and Phil and Melinda, and focused on clearing the streets around them. No matter how fast people went up the ladders--and there was at least one agent down with a bullet in him/her, so it wasn't going to be Special Forces-fast--the bus was going to be a sitting duck and Clint was not going to let it be a cakewalk for anyone to get a shot off at her.

"All right, people, listen up," Coulson said. "Once the bus gets here, we're not going to be able to hear a thing, so this is how we're going to proceed." Clint let him list out the extraction plan, interrupting only when Ward tried to argue that he should be the last up.

"Yeah, no," Clint said, shortly enough that if he still was working for SHIELD there'd be yet another Doesn't-Play-Well-With-Others mark in his file. Fortunately, he wasn't an agent these days, even if the team had started back working with SHIELD; it didn't matter to him but it at least meant he didn't have to waste time on a disciplinary hearing. "I've got the best angle to keep the square clear and you can sweep-shoot with that pulse rifle on the way up."

Ward started to argue, but they could hear the bus already, the noise of her engines increasing steadily. Phil shut him down, saying, "I'll defer to Hawkeye's assessment on this," which was pretty unlike Phil. Clint didn't have time to worry about it, though; May was coming in hot and and it was showtime.

Natasha had her agents out of the building almost before May made the shift to hover and the rest of Phil's team started kicking ladders out of the cargo hold. Clint had his hands full taking out one goon after another; Ward and his pulse rifle across the square were firing steadily, too, and there was another shooter on the ground triangulating the square and catching what slipped by Clint and Ward.

For a brief few minutes, Clint thought they were going to make it without everything going to hell, but May had just eased to the side to get to Ward when three of the Latverian goons made it to the roof across from Clint. Not good, but not a disaster, at least not until one of them dropped to one knee the way Clint knew meant he/she/whatever was stabilizing their aim.

"RPG, RPG, RPG," Clint yelled, hoping somebody could hear him over the noise of May holding all that steel solid and strong in hover-mode. He got off a couple of arrows and knew he hit the shooter, but not before he saw the arc of the rocket-trail as it headed up toward the bus. Somehow--maybe she heard Clint or she saw something that pinged her alarms or, hell, for all Clint knew, she could see the future (it would explain a lot of shit over the years)--May put the bus into a climb that shouldn't have been possible and the grenade blew a couple of feet below the fuselage.

"Gogogogogogo," Clint kept yelling, because he could see them setting up for another shot. He had three arrows left, but they'd gotten themselves positioned so he didn't have the angle. On the principle of the thing, he sent a timed detonator their way, which at least got their attention off Ward halfway up the ladder to the cargo hold. It--of course--meant their attention was on Clint--and they were pretty pissed--but Ward was having a good time spraying the roof with the pulse rifle on auto. He had it set for high energy and the shortest interval between shots, which gave Clint just enough time to drop a line off the backside of the building and flip over after it before the gun overheated and Ward had to let it go.

The crampon at the end of Clint's line bit into the brick of the building and held hard. In the first decent thing about the entire messed-up op, Clint managed not to slam into the bricks, or wrench his shoulder, or even burn through his shooting gloves as he slid down the wire for the final two stories. He did hit the ground pretty solid, but he had enough space to flip into a forward roll with the momentum so he didn't break anything or even jar his back and hips too bad.

"Very nice," Phil said, and Clint looked up to see him at the end of the alley, Sig in hand. "I especially appreciate how you're not bleeding from anywhere."

Clint snapped off a pretty sharp salute--he had so much adrenaline screaming through his veins he was pretty impressed that was all he did--and collapsed his bow with a little more force than was necessary, but hey, _adrenaline_.

"Bus, this is Coulson, you're clear." Phil tossed Clint a small duffel that was just big enough to hold Clint's bow and quiver and--bonus--had a hoodie in it that went a long way toward rendering Clint unremarkable and invisible.

"Coulson--" May started, but Clint wasn't the only one on an adrenaline rush, not from how Phil talked right over her.

"Iron Man is on the Hulk. I've got Hawkeye; we're tracking for the safe house."

Clint was maybe a little bit impressed, because it wasn't just anybody who could get that tone of freezing, teeth-grinding silence out of May, mostly because it took balls of steel to cross her like that.

"Bus? Do you copy?"

Clint knew Phil could hear the plane's engines still climbing; he must like playing with fire these days.

" _Try_ not to do anything stupid," May finally answered. Phil rolled his eyes at the _jackass_ that was so very clearly implied by her tone, but he didn't say anything. "Hawk, you've got my team with you."

"On it," Clint answered. "You've got mine, too."

"Roger that," May said. "Bus, out."

"Safe house, huh?" Clint shrugged on the hoodie and slung the duffel over his shoulder. "I'm guessing it's on the other side of the city?"

"Of course," Phil replied. He tucked his Sig back under his jacket and straightened his tie. "It would be entirely too simple for it to be easy to get to."

They worked their way across a couple of alleys and residential streets, Clint relying on the map he knew Phil carried in his head, until they were skirting another square, this one with a few small cafes and shops still open despite all the Doombot-Avengers excitement. Phil zeroed in on a small storefront that had secondhand clothes mixed in with the rest of the goods; Clint let him go into his confused-American routine and then slid in and lifted a pair of serviceable, sturdy canvas pants. By the time Clint had ducked out into the alley and slit the bottom seams so he could pull them on over his boots and tac suit, Phil had managed to overpay enough while buying a round of useless "souvenirs" that nobody's karma was going to be damaged in the transaction.

Clint sauntered out with his head down and the hood pulled up, wandering down the street until he found another alley where Phil could lose the coat and tie and roll his sleeves, so that the stiff, pompous tourist disappeared and a more casual, easy-going one took his place. Phil was relatively anonymous, of course, and if Clint kept his head down, he could probably dodge enough facial-recognition software to fade into the city. They still took turns leading and following, not pairing off more than once every six or seven blocks, mixing up the impression they were leaving behind to throw off anyone who might be looking for them.

They moved as quickly as they could without calling attention to it, but it still took close to three hours to make their way across the city to the apartment in an old building, and they were both in that extra-special state that was equal parts hypervigilance and exhaustion.

"Okay," Clint said, surveying the room. "This actually isn't the worst safe house I've ever seen. I mean, look, there isn't even anyone waiting to kill us."

"At some point, you are going to let Cartagena go, yes?" Phil asked, but it was mostly rhetorical, Clint could tell. Safe houses might be shitty, but they were supposed to be, y'know, _safe_. Being greeted by a rogue asset with a pair of knives was not in the plan. Clint didn't care how good the adrenaline-fueled sex had been once they'd gotten clear of that cluster (and it had been good, more than good--Phil had taken him against the wall, fucked him so hard Clint had ached for days, had worn the finger-shaped bruises on his hips and bite marks on his shoulders like the prizes they were) he was completely on-board with never repeating that again.

"Don't knock the good times, Coulson." Clint unslung the duffel and dropped it on the floor. He was too keyed up to settle in, but at least there was enough space for him to move around and different rooms for him to check out while Phil set about making contact triggering the arranging for extraction. "Wait, there's a shower and nothing's growing in it--this might be the best ever. And hey, like you said, neither one of us is bleeding."

"It's practically a vacation," Phil said drily. He'd finished with his series of coded phone calls and was watching Clint move, his eyes tracking every twitch. "When you finish prowling around, there's even food."

"MREs don't really count as food," Clint snarked back automatically, but the truth was he could eat sawdust right after an op and not complain. Phil knew that, but he still went through the tidy stack of packages and set aside the chili mac for Clint before choosing one for himself. He moved with neat precision that was almost painful in its attention to detail. Clint knew that almost as well as he knew his own restless jittering, but it was still a little much when Phil was literally snatching the wrappings up almost before Clint had peeled them off his food.

"Sorry," Phil said, moving his hands back with what Clint could tell was a conscious effort. "I-- sorry."

"Yeah, sure," Clint said through gritted teeth, because right, he got that Phil went into over-controlling mode, but _he_ still needed a thousand times more space than usual and he wasn't good when he didn't get it. "It's not like I haven't met you."

And, okay, that was probably a little bitchier than it needed to be, but it definitely did not deserve the stiff, disapproving, I-am-the-senior-agent-here pinched mouth Phil was throwing at him. Clint fucking hated that expression; it punched every single button he had even when he wasn't strung out from an op.

"Excuse me?" Phil snapped, and Clint knew better, knew that anything that came out of his mouth wasn't going to help, but that snotty, superior tone Phil could pull was impossible not to react to.

"C'mon, Coulson, be real," Clint ground out. "It's your standard M.O.: you have to deal with everything yourself, because god knows what the rest of us morons might fuck up if you let us do anything."

"Being _real_ ," Phil shot back, "I hardly think it's my standard--"

"Seriously?" Somehow, Clint managed to remember they were at risk here, and didn't shout, but he was almost choking with how bad he wanted to. " _Seriously?_ You died, Coulson--you _died_ , and when you came back, the first goddamned thing you did was to go it alone." He clenched his hands into fistst to keep them from shaking. "Because _you_ knew best and I--" He breathed in slowly, and then forced the words through everything that had been sitting on his chest for months and months. "I wasn't good enough to help."

Phil was shaking his head before Clint even finished. "No," he said quietly. "No. It wasn't y--"

"Don't," Clint said, all the adrenaline that had been spiking through his blood gone now. "I don't need the 'it wasn't you; it was me' line." He had no idea why all this had come flooding out of him now, after all this time. He and Phil had forged an almost-friendship out of the mess, a little uneven and rocky sometimes, but solid enough that Kate had actually stopped commenting on Phil being around and FitzSimmons generally sent new arrowheads along whenever they knew Phil was meeting up with Clint. What they had now--it was nothing compared to before, but it was something and Clint knew all about making do with what was, rather than what could have been.

Of course, he also knew all about fucking things up royally, so maybe he shouldn't be surprised to be doing it again.

"I wish I could," Phil said, still in that quiet voice. "It was me, though--I couldn't think past all that was wrong with me." He stayed over on his side of the room, but he was all Clint could see, same as it'd always been, right from the first. "And… I wanted you there, I did, but--" He rubbed hard at the bridge of his nose, the first warning sign of one of his infrequent migraines. "I couldn't _think_ ," he repeated.

"Phil," Clint said, and he'd somehow slipped into the tone he used with civilians, people who'd seen things no one should ever have to see and didn't need him banging in on top of them. He wasn't thinking about how he'd learned a lot of it from Phil, because that was going to take them places they didn't need to revisit. "You shouldn't have had to be thinking. I just… wish you hadn't decided I was better off not knowing."

"That wasn't the only reason," Phil said in a voice that barely more than a murmur. He dropped down gracelessly to sit in one of the straight-backed, vinyl-covered chairs that were gathered around the small kitchen table; Clint stayed frozen where he stood, suddenly and terribly sure that he should have kept his mouth shut and let Phil be his usual post-op, control-freak self. Phil smiled a little, one of the least happy-looking expressions Clint had ever seen on him. "I--I knew what I'd wanted our relationship to be, but you..."

"I--" Clint's voice came out as nothing but a hoarse whisper, so he stopped and tried again. "I wanted to be with you, but I couldn't see how you could trust that. How anybody can trust it. It scares the shit out of me and that--it just doesn't seem like a good way to start something permanent."

"I told myself I could wait." Phil nodded once. "But then, after... everything, all I had was time to think and I could see so many times where I had pushed too hard and I…" He smiled that unhappy smile again. "I wasn't sure that you hadn't settled on our relationship being something more casual and I didn't know if that included hospitals and, well, whatever else was happening."

Clint's jaw dropped and Phil added, "I was too much of a coward to find out for sure--"

"You didn't think I'd _come_?" Clint interrupted. He was actually pretty proud that his voice stayed below a shout, because that was the stupidest fucking thing he'd ever heard, so stupid he couldn't even be insulted.

"No," Phil said slowly. "I never thought you wouldn't come--I knew that you would--but I didn't want to push you into a situation that wasn't what you'd signed on for, all because I thought there was something more between us than there was." He shrugged, small and helpless. "It was weak but I couldn't make myself take that risk, so...."

"Preemptive strike," Clint murmured. His own favorite way of dealing with shit, which was maybe why he wasn't getting pissed off--he didn't see where he had much of the high ground. Or maybe it was because he knew how bone-deep that kind of fear could run, how almost anything looked like a good idea to keep it from becoming the truth. Whatever the reason was, he mostly just felt for Phil getting pulled under by it. "Good to know you're not perfect, Coulson."

"No," Phil said. "I'm not." The way he said it, intense and relieved and maybe a little ashamed, made Clint take note, but then whatever it was passed (or Phil shoved it away, which was definitely something Clint needed to revisit here) and Phil was back in professional mode. Clint hesitated, thinking about pushing for more, but as much as he wanted to know what was really going on, professional mode was probably where they should be. They were still on the ground in a hostile environment and whether or not Budapest liked Clint, Doombots weren't known for letting things go.

"We still have a few hours before need to rendezvous with the extraction team," Phil said. "Enough time for a shower or some sleep."

Clint cleaned up first, a fast, hot shower that at least got the topmost layer of sweat and grime off. Phil was equally as quick and then they argued, as they always had, over who slept first.

"I did not fly a quinjet halfway around the world and then climb a building so I could stand out on a roof, shooting and being shot at," Phil said. "I was driven in a boring, but comfortable sedan, walked the last 3 blocks and then met you on the ground after you jumped."

"Yeah, and I'm still keyed up from all of that," Clint countered. "I'm not going to sleep, you know that."

In the end, they flipped for it, and even though Clint supplied the quarter they used, he had the feeling Phil had rigged it somehow. When he told Phil that, Phil only sighed and looked pointedly toward the small bedroom.

"I'm still not going to sleep," Clint complained even as he threw himself down on the mattress. He couldn't even begin to remember how often they'd had this conversation.

"Lie quietly," Phil answered, like he always did. "Let your body rest." Clint thought Phil might be grinding his teeth, but the light in the room was off and not even Hawkeye could see in the dark, at least not until his eyes got accustomed. This, the waiting, was the hardest part of the job for Clint. Not knowing what was happening with Nat and the team--and Phil's team, too--sucked, but he couldn't let it distract him before his part in all of this was done. He'd worked too hard to get back into fighting shape to lose it now. Besides, Nat would put his head through a wall if he didn't keep it together, so he pounded the pillow into something a little more comfortable and got himself breathing right. Out in the main room, Phil settled in at the table; after a bit, he flicked on a tiny reading light and pulled out one of his notebooks.

After the Chitauri, when Clint was lucky if he was getting two hours of sleep without screaming nightmares, Bruce had walked Clint through the basics of meditation. It wasn't something Clint had ever thought much about, and he still wasn't sure he did it right, but it had helped him calm his mind, at least a little. At that point in time, Clint had been taking whatever he could get, so he kept up with it as best he could. Bruce had him focusing on a candle flame; watching Phil through the crack in the doorway, the curve of his jaw, his mouth, the small movements in his arms as he wrote--it felt a lot like watching the candle. Clint never slept, but he did like Phil asked and let his body start to catch up from everything he'd put it through in the previous day.

After two hours, Phil came and got Clint, and Clint stared him down until he took Clint's place on the narrow bed and closed his eyes. Clint snorted at the fake-innocent expression Phil was managing to project, like Clint wouldn't remember needing to have Natasha slip him an Ambien or two back in the day.

"Two hours," Phil murmured. "Alarm's set. 'M not going to sleep."

"Rest your body," Clint parroted, and then went to sort through his quiver and see what he had left. He knew exactly what was there, of course, down to the random arrowhead, but it never hurt to double- (or triple-) check. Sitting in the light, he couldn't see Phil as easily as before, but he kept his eyes where he knew Phil was lying and let the familiar routine of bow and quiver settle into his hands and mind and body.

The quiet wasn't his enemy now; he'd gotten to a point where he could sit with his thoughts and not want to claw them out of his brain. Sometimes—not often, but sometimes—he could even look at them and see them for wants and needs and fears, acknowledge them as possibilities that he could say yes or no to. He'd still rather face down a platoon of Doombots than think about his feelings, but it wasn't like not thinking about them had ever worked out well. He wouldn't claim he'd achieved true self-awareness--everything in his head had always been a tangled mess--but it was hard to miss that trust--in himself just as much as other people--was the thing that tripped him up time and again.

He didn't exactly have a reliable baseline for what he should or shouldn't let into his life, or how he was supposed to deal with people who expected him to trust them when he didn't, let alone where to draw the line between self-preservation and forgiveness. He wasn't even sure if he could figure out what questions he was supposed to be asking and there weren't a ton of people he could check in with for an informed opinion. Bruce felt pretty strongly that even if you could only sit with an issue it would help find a way through it, and since Bruce was the smartest guy Clint had ever met about stuff like that, Clint figured he'd give it a try.

He didn't know whether he was doing it right or what, but by the time the alarm went off, he didn't seem to be any closer to knowing what the hell was going on in his brain. On the other hand, he was pretty calm and centered, like he could deal with whatever shit was waiting for them once they left to make it to the extraction zone. Phil came out, buttoning his shirt over his Kevlar; he looked to be in the same mood as Clint, ready for anything. He checked his Sig, and a little 9 mm in an ankle holster while Clint suited up and made sure his knives were ready to go. The day was finally fading into night when Phil nodded once to him and they left the apartment to make for the river.

"Some day," Phil murmured as they walked, "some day I will be here as an actual tourist, not just while I'm pretending to be one."

"Sounds like there's a checklist in the making," Clint answered, all nice and easy, like they really were tourists out for a walk, not armed to the teeth and keeping a sharp watch for anything that might be Doom-related.

"You have no idea," Phil said, a low note of yearning under the familiar dry tone. Clint wanted to ask what Phil would do, where he would go, but a car was pulling up to wait for them at the corner. Clint hung back, one hand on the knife inside his pocket and let Phil step up to initiate contact. Neither of them expected trouble, but it wouldn't be the first time something had gone wrong on an extraction. It wouldn't even be the first time something had gone wrong with an extraction in Budapest.

Phil's body language was good, though, so Clint followed him into the back seat of the SUV and they made it out to the airfield and the waiting 'jet without an incident. It was almost too easy--Clint hated being a pessimist, but Phil didn't object when Clint looked at the pilot, a guy who looked vaguely familiar, and said, "Thanks, but I'm on the stick."

There was a little bit of fuss since Clint technically wasn't pilot-rated with SHIELD anymore, but once Phil (in that bland voice that Clint fucking loved to watch wreak havoc on its recipient) offered to contact Fury personally, all objections melted away and Clint got them in the air. If nothing else, flying kept most of Clint's brain in that clear, focused place he'd found. There was something building around the edges, things dancing right out of reach of his conscious mind, but he'd learned enough to know to let it go until it was better-formed. The pilot he'd replaced was keeping an eye on him from the right-hand seat (which Clint didn't take any offense over--he'd have done the same thing himself if somebody had knocked him out of the flight seat.) Phil was behind them, fingers flying across a tablet as he checked in with the 'carrier and relayed the news that everyone else had come through the incident without any major problems. Clint expected him to go find someplace more comfortable than the jump seat after that, but Phil stayed right where he was and kept working. For having just walked out of a red zone, it was as quiet and comfortable as Clint's life got.

The 'carrier was out in the Atlantic, off the coast of Iceland; Clint was putting the quinjet down on her flight deck after only a few hours. It still made for a hellaciously long day and pretty much every muscle in his body was yelling at him for it. Phil was moving almost as slowly as they climbed down out of the cockpit and waited for the air boss to clear them.

"I'll be debriefing with the director," Phil was saying into his phone. "Yes, Skye, I realize Reykjavik has some limitations but a little down-time is never unwelcome. I'll be on the ground with you inside 24 hours."

It wasn't anything unusual, only Phil going back to his life while Clint went back to his, but it sucked, and Clint finally got what he'd been trying to figure out. He signed off on the 'jet tracking while Phil finished things up with May, and then decided he wasn't going to be a chickenshit about it.

"Look, before I go catch my ride," Clint said, nodding to the upgraded Pave Hawk at the end of the flight deck. The Stark logo on the fuselage was hard to miss and Clint couldn't think of any other reason for one of Tony's long-range helicopters to be near SHIELD than to give him a ride home. "I--you don't have to answer, not right now, I mean. I--just."

Clint stopped and thought about it all for another quick second, but it was still there in his head, impossible to not see. He could back off and not say it, but he couldn't pretend he didn't know it.

"I miss you. Us." Clint made himself meet Phil's eyes because he was never going to be able to say this again and he needed Phil to know that he wasn't fucking around. "I miss us."

Phil was staring at Clint like he'd suddenly turned blue or something. Clint got it: he was pretty damned shocked he'd said it, too, but he didn't have time to freak out, not quite yet.

"I don't know what that means or where I want it to go--or how it fits with your life now, or, hell, I don't even know." Clint shook his head. He was probably an idiot for opening this up in the middle of everything, but 'idiot' was practically his middle name. "I--just wanted to put it out there, I guess. I know you need to get up to Fury and all, so..." He took a deep breath and then let it out slowly as he turned and made for the helicopter, feeling a lot less stressed about having confessed to feelings than he expected.

"Clint!" Phil had gotten back most of his usual surface calm. "Your plan was to say that and leave?"

"'Plan' is maybe too strong of a word," Clint answered as Phil caught up to him. "You know me better than that."

"Yes," Phil said, smiling. "I do." He got serious again, but it was the good kind of serious, the kind that meant he was looking at all the angles, the kind that had saved Clint's ass more than once. Clint wasn't sure what he'd said would hold up under that kind of serious, but if it did, it wasn't going to be a pipe dream. It'd be solid. _Real_. "Not that I think that you would be playing any kind of a game, but… I'm not entirely certain I understand this, and I need to."

"Look," Clint said, and yes, they apparently were going to do this standing on the flight deck of the helicarrier, in the middle of the North Atlantic, but he'd long since given up trying to make his life make sense. It just was what it was. "I've screwed up a lot of thing in my life, and it's not like that's changed recently--" He bit back the whole stupid story of how he'd fucked Jess over, because they could get into that later. "But today, I kinda figured out that we, I don't know... We fit, I guess?" He paused for a second to see how that felt. "Yeah, that. And it's different than it was before--but it's still good and if it could work, I didn't want to leave it laying on the table. Life's too short, y'know?"

"I do," Phil agreed. "And it is. I'm afraid it's not as simple as that." He smiled another one of his not-happy smiles. "As much as I want it to be."

Clint took that last part and held onto it hard. "Maybe," he said, slowly, feeling his way, "maybe it could be, if we only looked at the next step?"

"Maybe," Phil said, but Clint could tell he wasn't at all believing it. "You had doubts even before the Chitauri, though. I'm not sure how my actions after that could be anything but exacerbating to that uncertainty."

"If you can get past me being the one who tore things up enough that Loki could run you through, I can get past you not being dead."

"That's hardly the same," Phil said. "It wasn't y--"

"Yeah," Clint said, before Phil could go off down that road. "It wasn't me, it wasn't my fault, it was Loki--trust me, I've heard it. Working on dealing with it. But if you're thinking you were acting without influence when you woke up knowing something was wrong, I'm gonna have to fight you on that."

"Clint--" Phil started.

"Like I said," Clint interrupted. "You don't have to say anything now." He motioned to where Fury had descended from on high and was watching them from the far side of the flight deck. If he hadn't been in the middle of an interpersonal crisis, Clint would have been having a great time with how freaked out the crew was. "You should go deal with the debriefing. I -need to go check in with Cap and everybody before they start harassing Hill and Fury again."

He was pretty much running away, but Phil let him get away with it, so Clint was going to go with them having hit their limit of talking about the hard shit for the day. It took a couple of hours to get back to New York, but Tony's upgrades meant the ride was pretty comfortable. The only problem Clint had with the situation was that he was too tired to get up in the cockpit and check out how she handled himself. He downed about a gallon of coffee and ate his way through the galley (real food, of course, no MREs ever came near a Stark kitchen) and managed to be relatively with it by the time they touched down on the Tower's helipad.

Cap came up to meet him and ended up walking down to the gym him, which let Clint get the unofficially official check-in taken care of on his way to get to Nat and let her make sure he was okay while he did the same to her. She was, as he expected, in the middle of some crazy yoga pose when they got there, but she smiled at him from upside down and untangled herself without any fuss. She had a butterfly closing a cut over her eyebrow, but hadn't bothered with Medical, so he frowned at her until she promised she go let somebody take a look at it.

"But only because you look like you're going to pass out whether or not you're anywhere near a bed," she said, pushing him toward the elevator. "Go."

Ordinarily, Clint wouldn't have trusted her, but Cap was standing right there and he'd make sure she didn't 'forget', so Clint went, stopping by Tony's shop on the way out.

"You're not bandaged," Tony said. "Or bleeding. It's not a bad look on you."

"Sometimes even the fucked-up scenarios have an okay ending," Clint told him. "How's Bruce?"

"Sleeping it off." Tony shrugged. "The Big Guy was _pissed_ about the 'jet. He had to smash everybody who broke it, which took a while. Bruce was extra wiped-out when he came back."

"Yeah, I could hear him while we were pinned down." Clint knew the Hulk could take care of himself, but that it didn't make it any easier to know he'd been out there essentially alone. "Tell him I'll be over for a curry fix once I crash for a couple of days."

"Crash here and you can tell him yourself." Tony didn't bother to look up from the engine he was tinkering with, but Clint heard all kinds of stuff under the too-casual tone. Tony wouldn't ever say anything outright; Clint still knew he liked being able to take care of the team.

"Thanks, man," Clint said after a couple of seconds to think about it. "I appreciate the offer, but I should probably head back to my place." He was pretty sure the Russians hadn't started stirring up shit again, but he hated to be away for too long in case they got any bright ideas. And then, because this was apparently the day for actually talking about shit, he added, "You know I'm not blowing smoke, right? I mean, the floor you set up for me here is--nobody ever really did anything like that for me--"

Tony's head came up at that; he looked at Clint through narrowed, assessing eyes. "Feelings, Katniss? You sure they didn't miss a concussion?"

"Fuck off," Clint said easily. "I'm just saying I probably wouldn't have made it through everything without it."

"JARVIS does good work," Tony said, as though JARVIS had nothing to do with him. Clint rolled his eyes, but let it go, mostly because the caffeine had worn off and he was dead on his feet.

"I'm gonna head out," Clint said. "Catch you later." He made it into the elevator and down a couple of floors before JARVIS must have ratted him out for catnapping against the wall because Tony beat him down to the main floor and hassled him into being driven home. Clint wasn't sure if Tony was really all that worried about him or was looking for an excuse to get his latest toy car out on the streets, but either way Clint was too fucking tired to argue. He slept on the way and then managed not to drown in the shower before he went face down into his bed.

He was still dead to the world twelve hours later when some asshole started beating on his door. If Lucky had been there, he'd have been going berserk with the barking, but since he was off living the Hollywood life with Kate, Clint just dragged a pillow over his head and made like he wasn't home.

It didn't work.

After another three minutes of non-stop pounding, Clint threw himself off the mattress and stormed over to the door, yanking a pair of jeans on and stashing a snub-nosed .38 in the waistband as he went. He figured the Russians would have already been shooting but you could never be too sure, so he grabbed a couple of knives as well.

"Fucking _what_ , already," he shouted as he fumbled with the deadbolts. The pounding kept going. "What kind of a goddamned drama queen can't just call--" Right as he flipped the last lock and yanked on the door to open it, he remembered where it was that he lived these days. He closed his mouth with a snap and hoped like hell it wasn't Simone and the kids.

"If you'd answer your phone, I'd be thrilled to avoid the drama," Phil said calmly for all that he was breathless and flushed from where he'd been whaling on Clint's door. Clint stood there like an idiot and stared. Phil smiled. "I tried not to leave any dents, but I might have gotten carried away."

"What are--" Clint's voice came out wrong, like he was choking, so he stopped and swallowed hard and tried again. "Why are you--is everybody okay?"

"As far as I know, everyone on both our teams is fine," Phil said. "I'm not here in any kind of official capacity."

"Oh," Clint said, his brain taking a second to catch up and supply the information that if Phil wasn't here officially, he was here personally. " _Oh._ " The lines at the corner of Phil's eyes deepened into a familiar, private smile, one that did a number on Clint's breathing and heartbeat. Before he could get too distracted, though, he remembered that he was standing there in nothing but a pair of jeans. "I--okay?" He stumbled back out of the doorway. "You should--would you like to come in?"

"Yes, thank you," Phil said, following Clint. "It's probably better if we don't do this in front of your neighbors."

"Too late," Clint muttered, catching sight of at least three doors along the hall easing back closed. He slammed his door shut, hoping it'd at least get the _Hi, private_ message across but not exactly counting on it.

When Clint turned around, Phil was watching him, focused and intent and so familiar Clint couldn't be misinterpreting what he was seeing. He double-checked, just in case, though.

"One step, right?"

"I think that was your plan, yes," Phil said.

"There you go with that word again," Clint teased, and _fuck_ , it felt good to be here with Phil like this, easy and wanting and together. "I'm probably just going to wing it now, okay?"

"Yes," Phil said, almost soundlessly. "Please."

Clint moved carefully, crossing over to Phil slowly, just in case Phil needed the time. His heart was slamming hard in his chest and his hand wasn't quite steady when he reached for Phil, but then they were right up against each other, wool and silk and cotton against Clint's skin, Phil's hands and mouth on him, and it didn't matter that Clint was shaking because Phil was there to hold him up.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  ~~Here, have some porn.~~ *koff*
> 
> For those of you reading along, please note this bumped up to an Explicit rating.

It definitely said something about them that they could deal with alien mind control and coming back from the dead with only a little stress (okay, maybe more than a little, but c'mon, alien mind control. Resurrection. These were not normal things.) but a restaurant having a dress code triggered some kind of massive crisis.

Mostly, Clint thought, it said that he was a fucking idiot, but, yeah, whatever. He'd lost the battle to keep his mouth shut, which had set Phil off and it didn't matter that the sarcastic snarling (Clint) and icy hissing (Phil) was over and there had been apologies all around, now Phil was eying Clint with that thoughtful, assessing look that meant he was thinking hard, and had Clint mentioned that he was an _idiot_?

"This isn't about wearing a tie, is it?" Phil asked.

Since he was actually asking, not making a snide comment, Clint found himself answering honestly, if not entirely coherently. "Yeah, no—I mean, not really?" He blew out in a short, fast exhale and tried again, slowly this time and picking his words out carefully. It helped that Phil was waiting him out. "I don't care, you know. I mean, it's not my favorite thing to do, but I can deal. And I get that this place is impossible to get reservations for and you must have jumped through fifty different hoops to get the table, but…"

"I thought you'd like it," Phil said quietly.

"Yeah," Clint sighed. "I know—no, really, I do know. You put a lot of thought into it, you always do; it's just..." People flowed around where they'd stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, jostling past them with a few aggravated looks, but mostly ignoring him and Phil and their issues. Sometimes, Clint loved New York. "Look, if it was Sitwell you were meeting up with, you'd have been bouncing ideas off each other, seeing who'd found the most interesting place." He shrugged. "I get that I was barely two steps above illiterate when we met and my only opinion was that I liked whatever was going to keep me fed and off the streets, but that was fifteen years ago and I—I'm not that—" There were a lot of things Clint used to be, but Phil hadn't ever liked when Clint said them and he didn't want to fight over that, too, so he only said, "I'm not that now."

"I never meant to imply you were," Phil said almost before Clint finished talking. Clint wished he didn't feel a surge of relief at the words, because he knew Phil hadn't meant that, but it still felt good to hear it straight-up. He nodded and then Phil looked relieved, like he'd been worried that Clint had thought that, and this was not how Clint had intended to spend any of their time together. Considering that it practically took an act-of-Fury to get him and Phil on the same continent even for a night, Clint had been hoping to be someplace way more private than a Manhattan sidewalk by this point in the proceedings. "I--" Phil stopped for a second before taking a deep breath and going on. "When we first started seeing each other I couldn't--" He stopped again, and the look on his face had Clint reaching for his hand. Phil smiled at Clint, and when he continued, he was back to his usual even tone. He didn't let go of Clint's hand, though. "Well, I was certain it was only a matter of time before you came to your senses and realized how very boring my life was. I decided that the least I could do would be to make sure that didn't spill over into our time together. I possibly carried it a bit too far."

"Ya think?" Clint managed not to look like a complete idiot, but he could tell Phil got that he was fighting to keep his jaw off the ground, which at least saved Clint a little time in explaining how wrong all of that was.

"It wasn't only that," Phil added, earnest and sincere enough to give Cap a run for his money. "I liked being new places with you, trying new things. It gave me great pleasure to search them out, knowing that I could share them with you."

Clint had absolutely no idea how to answer that other than to pull Phil closer so he could kiss him. Phil came easily enough and Clint might have lost track of how long they stood there in the middle of the sidewalk, but when he finally let Phil up for air, they were both breathless and Phil was smiling at Clint like he'd reinvented the wheel so it seemed like it'd been a good idea.

"Did you have someplace you'd rather go?" Phil asked.

"I— No," Clint said. That was the seriously stupid part about all this. He didn't. He hadn't had anything he wanted to do that Phil's reservations had undone. Why Phil making plans for their time together had set him off this time (as opposed to every other time in the years they'd been together) wasn't making much sense, but there was no denying it had made him crazy. "Sorry."

"Do you want to keep the reservation? I'm fine either way," Phil said, still in that place where he was channeling Cap, looking at Clint with the super-honest eyes of truth.

Of course, now that Phil had asked Clint for a preference, the little voice in the back of Clint's head--the one that had always, always reminded Clint that Phil was a thousand miles out of his league and to just, for God's sake, keep his stupid mouth shut so Phil wouldn't figure that out--that voice was all but screaming at him to tell Phil it was fine, they could do whatever Phil wanted, Clint didn't mind at all. Except, of course, he did mind, and had just started a fight about it, one that had somehow not ended things, which meant he really shouldn't push his luck.

Phil waited him out without a single sign of impatience, not pushing even when Clint could only shrug. "I am completely fine with whatever you want to do," Phil said, and the sincerity in his voice was enough that Clint told the voice in his brain to shut the fuck up, because it might know all about making do with whatever might come its way, but it didn't know shit about anything real.

"Then, no," Clint finally made himself say. "I--if we go there, it'll take hours and--I'd rather just be with you." The last part came out in a mumbling rush, but it still got said. Phil didn't look annoyed or insulted or any of the other things Clint had maybe been worrying about for too long, so Clint saying all that was probably okay. Maybe. Before his brain could go off and dream up other disasters, he looked around and got his bearings. They hadn't gotten all that far from the Tower. "There's this place on the next block--kinda touristy but the steaks are decent..."

"Lead on," Phil said immediately, and Clint, surprising himself, took him at face value and got them going in the right direction. Clint had eaten there enough that they counted him as a regular and worked a table for two into the reservations with only a one-drink-at-the-bar wait so they were nearly through with their steaks before Clint's brain caught back up with him, pointing out how mediocre everything was, from the scotch to the food. Phil was watching him, though, and reached across the table to cover Clint's hand with his own. It took a second, but Clint settled into the warmth of the contact.

"I know this isn't your kind of place," Clint said. Phil had a thing about food; Clint should have known better than to just jump for the first place that came to mind. "I come here because it's convenient."

"I like that it's part of your life," Phil answered, his fingers lacing in between Clint's. "I like that it was your choice," and Clint let that be enough to take them through rest of dinner and back out onto the sidewalk.

"Now what?" Clint asked, and whatever he expected, it wasn't for Phil to stutter mid-step and turn red. "Phil?"

"I--ah, started thinking about other choices," Phil said, recovering quickly. Clint still knew what he'd seen and he couldn't remember the last Phil had lost it like that, so it almost didn't surprise him when Phil continued, "I thought it might be… interesting if the rest of the night was also your choice."

Almost.

"Okay, let's be really clear here," Clint said after a couple of seconds of not believing what he'd heard. "The rest of the night, meaning…"

"I'm not expected back on the bus until 0930 tomorrow," Phil said. "Barring any Avenger-related emergencies, the rest of the night, not only the evening."

"And _my_ choice, meaning…?"

"You say it, we'll do it."

Clint took one careful breath and then another, waiting for Phil to actually hear what he'd just said and take it all back, but Phil stayed right where he was, calm and patient, his suit pressed and sharp as always, the lingering flush high across his cheekbones the only sign that Clint wasn't hallucinating the hottest thing he'd ever heard.

"If we--" Clint stopped and breathed and tried again. "You know I never had any issues with, you know, us and sex, right?"

"Right," Phil said easily. "I haven't either."

"So, if I say yes, it's not because I haven't liked every single thing we've done. For real, Coulson, because I can't say that about a lot of people I've fucked so I know what I'm talking about."

Phil's mouth tightened, like it always did when Clint brought up shit like that, but his voice was even and smooth when he answered, "I believe you. And you shouldn't feel obligated to agree just because I suggested it."

"Not feel obligated-- _seriously_?"

Phil looked at him, steady and sure. Clint supposed it was a valid point given the near-meltdown over a restaurant, but the words had flown out of his mouth before he realized he was even thinking them.

"Yeah, no, I'm--I'm good." Clint rubbed the back of his hand across his mouth; Phil's eyes followed every move. Clint swallowed hard, and said, "So, if I said I didn't want to take the time to get back to Bed-Stuy and we should find someplace that wasn't the Tower…"

"I'd say that I could take care of that," Phil answered, the creases around his eyes deepening in the way that meant he was smiling big on the inside. It had taken Clint years to figure that out, but he didn't feel too stupid about because a whole hell of a lot of people never got it no matter how long they'd known him. Phil didn't mind Clint knowing—he kept doing it--so it was kind of like the eye smile was a gateway that Clint had passed through. Phil looked up and down the street, a swift, flickering glance that Clint knew took in everything around them, and then, his hand low on Clint's back, guided them across the street and into a lobby.

Clint's brain was mostly off-line with the fact that this scenario was actually playing out (and that Phil had started it.) The few cycles he had left were paying strict attention to Phil's hand on his back, so he had no idea where they were other than it looked like one of the upscale chains.

Then, Phil said, "No, no luggage," and Clint snapped back to the here-and-now. Phil was smiling that not-quite-scary smile at the uniformed hotel dude who'd just asked, the smile that said _No, no, you don't need to understand anything_. The lady who was checking them in kept her eyes on her computer and ran Phil's card, but Clint caught a little edge of a smile from her and let his own mouth curve up into a smirk. The guy who was dealing with the luggage might be judging them for not even pretending like they weren't there to fuck, but their check-in lady was definitely on their side.

Clint made sure the luggage guy saw the smirk--and Phil, too, because Clint wanted him to know that whatever had been going on earlier was well and truly gone, and being all smug about who he was walking through the lobby with was better than words. The elevator was one of the ones that were all glass; it seemed like a logical extension of the theme to stop smirking and start kissing. Phil was laughing the whole time, but he was breathless and the flush was back; that, plus, you know, the making out added up to a win-win scenario in Clint's book.

Their room was all the way at the end of the hall; Clint could have kept up with the kissing, but walking and making out generally took longer than just walking, so he settled for holding hands on the way. When Phil looked down at their hands and then back up at Clint, the gleam in his eye was a little worrisome.

"Nobody will actually believe it even if you tell," Clint warned, which was the truth even if it was a sad comment on his relationship skills.

"I have one or two closet romantics on my team who would enjoy photographic proof," Phil answered, but they were at the room and Clint could shut him up with a kiss. Phil got the door open without interrupting anything and they were finally, _finally_ alone. Clint hadn't really thought about what he might want, but the kissing was going well, so he kept that going.

Back when they first got together, they'd spent years pretending their snarking at each other over mission comms wasn't flirting and then skipped right to Clint on his knees in an alley in Paris, all but choking himself on Phil's cock. This time, after Phil had nearly kicked in Clint's front door, they spent a lot of time taking things more slowly, letting the aliens and death and resurrection fade into the past. It was the first time in Clint's life he'd ever not gotten right to the fucking; it turned out that he seriously liked kissing, liked being sprawled out next to Phil, making out until his lips were hot and swollen and so sensitized that a single breath across them could make him shake. He liked the way the want snuck up on him, how it bubbled through his veins and made him loose and relaxed. He liked how taking it slow kept them close for hours and how it was easy to smile and laugh in the seconds when they came up for air.

The room was small, barely five steps before they were at the bed; Clint still lost track of how long it took to get there. It didn't matter, though. Phil was easy and pliant in his arms and they had all night. Clint knew lots of things Phil liked--the tiny, smooth patch of skin behind his ear that made him gasp when Clint mouthed over it, the curve of his jaw and how he'd not-quite whine if Clint raked his teeth across the pulse that beat under it--but more than just knowing, he liked taking his time and doing them all.

Phil slid his hands up under Clint's shirt; Clint nearly purred at the long, slow sweep of Phil's hands up his back. Phil broke away from the kiss long enough to smile, but then Clint bit him under his jaw and it was his turn to hum in satisfaction. He didn't stop stroking Clint's back, though, and Clint finally tore his mouth away from Phil's neck and gasped, "Off."

Phil smiled again and swept Clint's shirt off over his head, and then, before Clint could say or do anything, skimmed his hands down to unbutton Clint's jeans. "Yes?" he murmured, his fingers teasing just under the waistband.

"Fuck, yeah," Clint managed to answer. He had more he wanted to say, but Phil had dropped down to his knees to untie Clint's boots and the words died in Clint's throat. (To be honest, Clint wasn't sure that his entire brain hadn't died at the sight of Phil, still in his suit and tie, kneeling at his feet, but words were definitely not happening.)

"Easy," Phil said, leaning in to bite at the skin under Clint's navel. Clint jumped at the sudden quick stings, each one a tiny bit lower, a tiny bit closer to where he desperately wanted Phil's mouth, but got himself together enough to toe out of his unlaced boots. Phil's mouth curved into a smile against Clint's skin, all the warning Clint got before Phil tugged his jeans and boxers down in one quick jerk.

Clint didn't have many hang-ups about his body, and it was Phil--being naked in front of him wasn't anything new or unusual--but then Phil sat back on his heels and _looked_ at Clint, one slow, long, sliding gaze from his feet to his face and Clint could feel the heat of a flush sweeping over his skin.

"What do you want?" Phil asked, and Clint jolted out of the haze and remembered that they were doing what Clint wanted tonight. "Tell me?" Phil's voice was barely louder than a whisper, but filled with so much longing that it trampled right over the tired, familiar chorus in Clint's brain, the one still trying to insist that Clint was crazy if he thought he was good enough for anyone to truly care what he might want.

"You," Clint heard himself say, one hand reaching out to touch Phil's face, his mouth, the creases fanning out from his eyes. "I want you--your hands, your mouth, _you_." Phil turned into Clint's touch, his eyes heavy-lidded, the rest of him relaxed and open. "Everywhere," Clint said. "Everywhere, Phil."

"Yes," Phil breathed. He slid his hands up Clint's thighs, his body, pressing him back and onto the bed. Clint went where Phil put him, let himself sink down into the mattress, the sheets crisp and cool under his back, Phil warm and strong over him.

"No rush," Phil said, the tips of his fingers stroking long, lazy spirals over Clint's skin. Clint hummed in agreement, and was vaguely proud he even managed that much. Phil was taking Clint's 'everywhere' seriously, his mouth biting kisses along Clint's jaw and neck and down across his chest, his hands curving around Clint's biceps, wrapping tight around his wrists, teasing over his hips and thighs and belly.

Getting fucked hard and fast, that had always done it for Clint, but now he squirmed and arched and panted, his skin prickling with heat, and this, the way Phil was working Clint over, the way he was taking his time, circling back to the places that made Clint shake and whine, this was good, too. He made himself open his eyes, forced them to focus and Phil smiled down at him, flushed and happy.

"More?" Phil asked, and Clint tried to answer but it came out as nothing but a groan. Phil's laugh was low and genuine, as though Clint's incoherence was making his day, so Clint dropped his head back down onto the pillow and let Phil start back in. For all that Phil hadn't so much as breathed on it yet, Clint's dick was hard and aching against his belly; his brain went blank trying to imagine how good it was going to feel when Phil ran his nails along the length the way he was doing on the inside of Clint's thighs or how crazy it would make him if Phil licked light and tickling across the head like he done to Clint's nipples.

Phil got fixated or something and kept coming back to the same place on Clint's hip, sucking where the skin was thinnest, exactly hard enough that Clint knew there'd be a mark the next morning, and that, that pushed Clint right up against the edge, so that he didn't even think before choked out, "Harder, Phil, _fuck_ , please." Phil went still, just for a second, and then he was biting at Clint, gasping and panting as hard as Clint was, his hands holding Clint exactly how he wanted him, his teeth raking over the spot he'd already reddened. Clint thought that was going to be it, that they were going to come like that, Clint arching up desperately into Phil's mouth, Phil taking everything Clint was giving him and demanding more, but then Phil jerked back, pulling away even though he was shaking.

"What--?" It took three tries for Clint to get even that much out.

"Turn over." Phil looked almost as wrecked as Clint felt, his hands clenched into fists on his thighs, but his voice was steady. "You said 'everywhere.'"

Clint half-groaned, half-laughed. "God, Coulson, you and your obsession with details are gonna fucking kill me." He was rolling over, though, wrapping his arms around a pillow and burying his head in it.

"If it's worth doing..." Phil said, his mouth moving, light and ticklish, over the skin at the base of Clint's neck. Clint shivered at the touch and felt Phil smile against him.

"Do it, then," Clint answered, jumping when Phil's answer was a quick, sharp bite to replace the smile. "Fuck, yeah, _yeah_."

Phil took it as a challenge or permission or something, and worked his way down Clint's back, following the line of his spine, one little, stinging bite after another and another and another. Clint dug his hands into the pillow and tried to stay still, but the lower down his back Phil went, the less Clint could keep from arching up.

"I like you this way," Phil said, his beard heavy enough to scrape at Clint's skin, teeth worrying almost delicately at each vertebra. "I like giving you what you want."

"'s always good," Clint slurred, determined that Phil know that, even if he knew what Phil was saying, that this time was different. "I--oh, _fuck_ ," he groaned as Phil spread his thighs, opened him wide and licked up into him.

"You like this," Phil said, his voice low and rough and practically vibrating through Clint. He backed off for a few seconds, teased at Clint with the very tip of his tongue until Clint was swearing and twisting, pushing back into Phil, desperate for more. "You love it," Phil growled, holding Clint still and teasing him until he could barely breathe, until he was whining Phil's name.

Clint did love it, loved all of it, loved the way Phil took his time and worked Clint open, loved the way his body shook under Phil's tongue, heat flashing over him and leaving him weak and whimpering even with his jaw locked and tight. Phil let him move after a while; Clint should have been humiliated at how his legs spread wider and his back arched while he begged for more but he couldn't be, not with Phil moving with him, his tongue fucking into Clint without the slightest bit of hesitation or reluctance. Clint had never let himself go this far beyond control before and the idea of coming like this--helpless, all but wailing on Phil's tongue--danced through the edges of his thoughts, a tease of Clint's own making, but one that reminded him that he could do that if he wanted. Whatever Clint wanted, anything--that was what they were doing.

It was easy then, because Clint did know what he wanted, and for once he wasn't even going to listen to anything that told him otherwise.

"Wait," Clint managed to gasp. "Wait." Phil made a low, helpless noise but pulled away a little, just enough that Clint could drag himself over onto his back and pull Phil down on top of him. "Fuck me, okay? That's--I want that, you in me, now, Phil, now."

Clint wrapped his legs around Phil's waist and arched up to rub against him, his cock so sensitized that the fine wool of Phil's pants felt like sandpaper against it; Phil made another of those quiet noises and held himself up on one arm so he could work his belt and pants open with the other. They both hissed at the first touch of Phil's cock against Clint's, but then Phil went still and Clint knew where his brain had gone.

"I'm good," Clint said, drawing Phil down closer. "Don't need anything else."

"You aren't--" Phil said through gritted teeth. He was almost vibrating under Clint's hands, but he didn't move, didn't grind down into Clint. "Lube. I haven't--"

"Don't want it," Clint told him. He got his mouth on Phil's neck, mouthed over the pulse beating hard under the skin. "Want you now, want to be feeling you for days, Phil, when you're gone and I'm still here and--"

Phil didn't make him finish--which was good, because Clint was right there on the edge of needy and desperate--just reached for Clint's leg and hitched it over his forearm so he could push it up toward Clint's chest, opening Clint up with a clear, focused intent that made it hard to breathe. Clint let his head fall back onto the pillow and tried to be helpful, but Phil had it all covered, manhandling Clint, putting him exactly where Phil wanted him.

Given how much Clint had fucked around before he and Phil had found their way back to each other, they damn well had been using condoms for everything, but Clint had had two clear tests in a row and it felt so _fucking_ good to have Phil moving inside him, skin to skin, nothing but spit and pre-come to ease the way.

"Oh, god," Phil was panting. "Oh, _god_." Clint pretty much agreed with Phil's assessment of the situation--it was hard to argue with how his body was stretched around Phil, the first hot burn giving way to a deeper heat that felt like it was marking him--but Phil had turned something loose inside him and he was greedy now. He wanted more, wanted Phil closer, deeper.

"Wait," Clint said. "I want--" Phil stopped even before Clint finished, short, abrupt, like Clint had flipped a switch somewhere. Clint took everything that (Phil doing whatever Clint said, _fuck_ ) called up and shoved down deep before it completely made him crazy, and rolled up onto his elbows. "Let me--" Clint said, pressing Phil back and scrambling up after him. Phil slid out of him--Clint added that little disappointed noise Phil made to the rest of the stuff he couldn't think about right then--but it only took a couple of seconds before Clint had them the way he wanted them, Phil with his back to the wall, Clint straddling him, and he could take Phil back inside him. Phil tried to get him to go slow, but Clint wanted that hard stretch, wanted to be feeling it for a week.

"Like this," Clint said, moving fast. Phil tipped his head back and watched, his hands on Clint's hips, steadying him. Clint fucked himself on Phil's dick and Phil leaned back and let him, no cautions or objections, not even when Clint came all over the both of them and kept going until he dragged Phil along with him.

"Good?" Phil asked when Clint finally stilled. His voice was ragged and hoarse, but since Clint wasn't even going to try for words, Phil won that round. It didn't matter; Clint already had Phil so deep in him and when he got his legs to work and wrapped them around Phil, he had Phil pressed as close as possible. Phil turned his head and tucked it into where Clint's neck curved into his shoulder, mouthing over Clint's collarbone, and it didn't matter who won what round, because Clint won _everything_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I swear this was supposed to be them figuring things out about their prior relationship while they were just hanging out, but then it took a turn for the porn and never went back. I think it still does say things about how they were before, but... yeah. Mostly porn, sorry.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Heavy, heavy spoilers for _Hawkeye_ #15, plus spoilers for AoS through 1.14 ( _T.A.H.I.T.I._ ) and a few mentions of events from _Iron Man 3_.

The first thing Clint knew as he swam up to consciousness was that it was Natasha's hand on his arm. Even with only half his brain working--and that half drugged to the max--he knew the weight of her and the feel. He knew the calluses she had from fighting and the knicks and scars from her knives, and he knew from how tight her muscles were that whatever was waiting for him was going to be bad. She was there, though, she had his back, like always, and he made himself remember that even as the drugs and the pain tried to tear it away. 

Clint floated for awhile, not really unconscious, just drifting in and out, like the drugs had him surfing over the dark blue-black of the pain that threatened to drag him under, and gradually, he realized Natasha wasn't only touching him, but that the tiny strokes up and down his biceps were rhythmic and repetitive. He didn't know how long it took for his brain to catch the pattern, but she never stopped so he knew it was something she wanted him to pay attention to. It was simple, whatever it was, something he should have gotten without really even thinking about it, but it was almost impossible to think past the pain roaring in his head. 

He kept very still and let Natasha talk to him, over and over and over, the same light touches, and finally, it came to him. _Calm_ , she was telling him. _Calm_ , and she was telling him that in Morse code, so he answered in kind, because he couldn't remember much of anything except that he could always follow her lead. _Calm_ , she tapped out and he made his index finger double-tap an affirmative. She didn't notice it at first, but he kept answering her, until her rhythm faltered and he knew she'd seen it. She tapped it out twice more, and he answered the same way, and then when she switched to _sleep_ , he managed to lift his middle finger and flip her off, just to let her know that he still hated being down for the count. _Smartass_ , she answered, but her hand was shaking. Clint slid back under before he could open his eyes and see what was wrong. 

* - * - * - *

Nat was still there the next time Clint woke up, but not even having her next to him stopped the full-on panic attack when he realized the sharp ringing in his ears wasn't keeping him from hearing her, but was really all he _could_ hear. There was something on his head, covering his ears, and he knew better than to mess with shit when he was in the hospital, but he couldn't stop his hands from reaching up to claw it. Natasha threw herself across him and somebody else grabbed his wrists before he could get close, though, and he totally flipped out, twisting and trying to knock the weight (Nat, he knew it was Nat, he _knew_ , but he couldn't calm down) off him, pulling desperately against the grip on his wrists until something hit his blood hard and fast and he blacked out mid-fight. 

Nat was wrapped around him when he came to again, tucked up under one arm no matter that his wrists were cuffed to the bed rails. Before he even remembered how to open his eyes (fuck, but whatever they'd hit him with had taken him down _hard_ and his head wasn't sure if it was still attached to the rest of him), she had her hands on his face, her forehead resting against his. 

The ringing was still there, and Clint still couldn't hear, but flipping out hadn't done him any favors--the pain in his head was barely a step down from excruciating even under the familiar blurring of vicodin--and he couldn't remember the last time Nat had looked so worried, so he made himself breathe in and out, steady and slow. Natasha breathed with him, not moving for a long time. When she finally did shift off him to undo the restraints, she still kept close, a hand on his arm or leg, which was the only thing that kept Clint from throwing a punch when something--some _one_ \--flickered silently on the edge of his peripheral vision. He couldn't help jerking around toward the movement, though, and that--that turned his brain inside out and yanked the rest of him with it. 

Once, not long after Clint had joined up, his unit had pulled one of those ops that had started off wrong and spiraled straight into hell. He'd spent the better part of 90 hours crouched in a blind, certain that the rest of his team was dead and no one else even knew he was there to need exfil. By the time the Blackhawk had touched down in the valley to get him, he was dehydrated and delirious enough that he could barely drag himself into the helicopter. They'd flown out literally under the radar; Clint had been ready to die from the up-and-down that had entailed in the mountains. He'd never been one for vertigo (either that or Trick had knocked it out of him early on) but that flight had sent him into a tailspin of not being able to figure out which way was up, complete with dry heaves and blurred vision.

It had ended, though. As bad as it had been, it had ended and he'd been okay. Clint held onto that thought as this new hospital room spun around him. Natasha had grabbed for him, had both arms wrapped hard around him and that at least meant he wasn't there alone. Clint didn't think she was going to be happy about how he was probably holding on to her hard enough to leave fingerprint bruises, but he'd make it up to her. And--small mercies--he managed to not hit her--or himself--when the nausea twisted in so sharp and hard he couldn't keep from throwing up. 

After that, things settled down a little, at least enough that if he didn't move, it didn't feel like his brain was going to leak out of his ears. He took that break and let Natasha keep him grounded and tried to settle his breathing, because he'd had a split-second before the vertigo hit to see that it had been Jess, pale as a ghost, who'd been the flicker on the edge of his vision. Seeing her-- She'd been there, at the apartment and seeing her brought it all back, a long, sickening flood of the Russians and Simone and the kids with guns to their heads. Clint didn't know what hit him, or how he'd lived through it, but it didn't _matter_ , because the last thing he remembered was blood--Barney, thrown back from what had to be gunshots even if Clint couldn't remember hearing them, blood spraying everywhere.

Natasha was back with the Morse code, tapping out _breathe, breathe_ on the back of Clint's hand and he managed to double-tap an affirmative. He tried closing his eyes, to see if that helped with the spinning, but then he couldn't see _or_ hear, and as much as he trusted Nat, he couldn't let himself be that helpless. He kept his eyes open, fixed on the wall across from his bed and stayed as still as he could. It helped when he could finally get into the familiar, slow, four-count in-and-out of tactical breathing. Natasha breathed with him and held out one hand to draw Jess closer. 

There was a flurry of medical types in and out of the room, but Natasha kept them all at bay and let Clint settle. He tapped a quick _ty_ on her arm when they got the room cleaned up and he could feel the vibrations from her voice against his skin when she relayed the thanks, but there was still nothing but the ringing in his ears.

 _Barney_ , Clint tapped out, as soon as he thought he was okay enough to deal. From the way Natasha tightened up against him, she didn't agree, but she didn't try to talk him down, just answered, _critical_ and didn't let go of him while the relief shuddered through him. 'Critical' wasn't good but it was a hell of a lot better than 'DOA'.

 _ICU. See him later_ , Natasha added, because of course she knew everything that was trying to shake him apart, and then tipped her head to the side and Clint remembered Jess. Slowly, without moving more than was absolutely necessary, Clint turned so he could look her over for real, check and see for himself that she was okay. She laid her hand on his arm and tried to smile. Clint tried to smile back; they both were kind of useless, but they were here. 

_I'm fine,_ Jess mouthed. It was easy enough to see that even before Nat tapping it out confirmed it. _Everybody's okay._

Clint took one deep breath after another; whatever else, at least the kids were okay. He'd been too stupid to save Grills, he still had Barney on his conscience and it was going to take a long time to let go of the sight of Simone's kids with guns to their heads, but at least he hadn't fucked up any more than that.

 _Okay_ , Clint told Natasha and then settled back to let the medical-types swarm over him.

* - * - * - *

Cap came in while Clint and Nat were working through the whole mess that was currently Clint's life. The doctors hadn't had much good to say about Clint, other than him being lucky that he'd only had his eardrums perforated and not any brain injury. They'd let him go see Barney, though, and he'd spent a long time watching his big brother through the ICU window, the machines and tubes not seeming to be enough to keep him from being dragged away by everything under the acres of bandages. He was tough, though; Clint held onto that thought, hard, and let Natasha put him to work writing out what little he remembered from the attack. 

Jess had been on the stairs right behind Barney and had gotten a glimpse of the shooter. She'd managed to keep Barney from bleeding out, but that meant she hadn't been able to give chase. Of all the shitty things that Clint had woken up to, the worst was probably Jess trying to apologize for not going after the psycho while Clint could see the blood she hadn't been able to scrub away still staining her cuticles. She'd finally curled up on the armchair in Clint's room and was sleeping fitfully. Clint kept an eye on her while he and Nat sorted through what they did and didn't know. They'd had a good time together, him and Jess, at least until he'd fucked it up, but he really wished he'd had enough sense to stay the hell away from her. The last thing she needed was more blood and death to deal with and that never seemed to be far off on his horizon.

Natasha had quickly gotten tired of the Morse code and had produced notebooks and pens. Clint's handwriting kind of sucked, and his spelling was worse, so there was a lot of rewriting going on, but at least he could rip out the pages they'd already covered and not have to rehash everything to get Cap up to speed.

It didn't mean that he got to skip seeing Cap's face set into lines of deep disappointment as he read just how badly Clint had screwed up this time, but he pretty much deserved all that and more, so he could just suck it up and deal. It wasn't like he didn't have a lifetime's worth of experience at it or anything.

Cap caught on to the discussion and produced his own pen to join the conversation with his painfully neat and precise handwriting. There was a joke in there somewhere about how not even the Super Soldier serum was a match for the sisters' penmanship lessons, but Clint was too tired and hurting to make it. Instead, he just laid his head back against the pillows and let the other two try to sort out who had ordered the hit.

 _The list of ppl I've pissed off enough to want me dead is kinda endless_ , Clint finally wrote. _Not sure it even much matters--I brought it on myself._

Natasha smacked her hand down on the stupid, rolling bedside table and then stalked across the room to stare out of the window. Jess jerked awake, coming off the recliner ready to fight, at least until Natasha caught her arm and (Clint assumed) explained. He didn't need to hear to know Nat wasn't mincing her words. Cap shook his head, opening and closing his mouth, like he had no idea what to say, and then bent over the notebook. He wrote quick and sharp, his pen digging into the paper almost hard enough to tear through it. 

_Call me old-fashioned, but I don't take kindly to people getting arrows shoved into their heads, let alone my people._ Cap had that familiar, determined look in his eye and Clint honest-to-god didn't know how the guy did it, but even with his entire life's evidence about people to the contrary, Clint could believe in him.

 _Also,_ Cap wrote, _since you're scheduled for tests tomorrow, I won't let Natasha ‘re-calibrate' you for that last part, but you might want to keep in mind that nobody goes after an Avenger on my watch, don't care what they might or might not have brought on themselves._

It was a little blunt even for the the guy who made it so a bunch of loners managed to like being on a team, but Clint guessed him being functionally deaf made for extenuating circumstances. He probably could have come up with a better answer than a scribbled _thanks_ , but his head really fucking hurt and the rest of him wasn't feeling much better. Cap nodded once, like he was okay with it and Clint decided to let it be good enough.

Natasha stabbed her finger down on Cap's note and then mouthed _this_. Clint must have been looking pretty bad because she didn't even look tempted to smack him, just grabbed his hand and let him hang on to her for a couple of seconds before she started packing up the notes and research they'd been working on. Jess came over to help; there was some kind of conversation going on with Cap, but when Nat turned back to pick up a pen and presumably fill Clint in, he decided he could live with finding out later. Right at that moment, he was crashing, all the crazy adrenaline of waking up and finding everything out flooding out of his system so quickly he could barely get himself back against the raised bed slowly enough not to trip the vertigo. He managed, but only just, and the last thing he saw before he went out was Cap in the chair next the bed, settling in for the duration, which at least meant Clint knew somebody was keeping watch.

* - * - * - *

Clint woke up the next time to a room full of doctors. Cap was still there, though. Clint was kind of proud of himself for not being surprised at that. His brain had known for a long time that Cap didn't like his people dealing with medical issues alone, but it had taken the rest of him a long damn time to stop reverting to the baseline loner. Trust was hard, right?

Of course, there was the whole part about how he wouldn't be in the fucking hospital if he hadn't screwed up and tried to go it alone one more time, so, y'know, apparently, Clint had a ways to go still, but nobody was going to be surprised by that.

Cap gave him a half-smile that said he was there if Clint needed back-up, and then spent the rest of the time in the corner with his arms crossed, radiating that I'm-really-not-impressed attitude at the medical types until they wrote everything out well enough that Clint could follow along. Clint was happy to find out that Captain America's disappointment worked just as well on people with fancy degrees as it did on ex-carnie, white-trash snipers. 

The medical stuff boiled down to another round of MRIs and then they'd spring Clint so long as he had somebody to stay with him and help with the meds and bandages and shit. That almost tripped Clint up--he didn't know if he had a place or anything, not with the mess he'd left in BedStuy and Nat being out on a lot of ops--but Cap nodded once and everybody about fell over themselves to get things in order.

 _Thanks_ , Clint scribbled, when they had a minute to themselves. Cap smiled and shrugged. _Tower_ , he mouthed, which yeah, made sense, Clint guessed. It felt a little like running home with his tail between his legs, but since he'd fucked everything else up so spectacularly, it was way better than he deserved. He thought that was it--he just needed to sit around and wait for somebody to take him down to the basement so they could scan his head and see what was left of his inner ears--but Cap was fidgeting around like he had something more to say. 

In the end, he just held out one hand, his fist curled around something. Clint finally caught on that he should reach out, too, and Cap opened his fist and spilled a set of dog tags into Clint's open palm. Clint didn't have to look to know they were Phil's Ranger tags, just folded his hand around them and held them tight. He and Phil, they'd always done this--traded tags when one of them was grounded or in Medical and the other couldn't be around--and it felt good-- _right_ \--to have them now. It felt even better to realize that he hadn't doubted that Phil would get there if he could.

 _He came by while you were unconscious,_ Cap wrote. _Left those for you._ He had a stiff, uncomfortable look to him. He and Stark hadn't really gotten past the whole Phil-not-actually-being-dead thing (Clint thought it had more to do with their own issues than with Phil himself, but he sure as hell wasn't anyone to judge other people's dysfunctions) and there were still some pretty nasty feelings between Phil and Cap over Madripoor. It must have been epic-levels of awkward for Phil to have left the tags with Cap. Ordinarily, Clint got a kick out of anything that could ruffle Phil's feathers and he'd have been kinda sorry to have missed it, except he knew how much being on the outs with his hero ate away at the kid who still lived inside of Phil. That was different than Phil's perfectionism getting a little roughed up and Clint really didn't like that he was the trigger for it all, so he was just as glad to have been unconscious for this round. 

The really surprising thing was that Clint didn't actually care about Cap's opinion of him getting back together with Phil. If anybody had asked Clint before all this, he'd have said he wouldn't have dealt well with disappointing Captain America, but in this case, he really didn't give a flying fuck, just slipped the chain over his head and tucked the tags under his t-shirt. 

_thanks. again._ He met Cap's eyes as even and steady as possible, doing his best to reinforce that it was his life and his choice and it was the way it was because he wanted it that way, no matter what anybody else might think, and it was Cap who looked away first.

* - * - * - *

It took most of the day to get through the MRI and all the discharge paperwork. Clint spent a good hour sitting with Barney, who was still in ICU, but was at least holding his own, the stubborn son-of-a-bitch. Natasha showed up to push Clint's wheelchair (hospital regs and Clint's balance was iff-y enough that he didn't feel like starting a fight just to have her prove it by pushing him over) and drive him to the Tower. Clint wasn't sure what he expected, especially since he'd kind of run out on everyone when he was in that bad place after he found out Phil was alive, but it was like he'd been gone for a week-long mission or something, not moved out for almost a year. His floor still looked the same, still had all the stuff he'd tossed into the corners and forgotten about. His fridge was full and there was a post-it note on the front, in Pepper's handwriting, saying that Tony had a new R&D project for him when he felt up to it. 

Clint was all for checking it out right away, but Nat gave him the scary look, so he took his pain meds and crashed out for a couple of hours. She was right (of course); he was doing a hell of a lot better than before, but not being able to hear had the rest of him on high alert and it was grinding him down big-time. He could admit that to her, he guessed, even if he didn't want it out there with the rest of the world. It worked out okay, because she came and crashed out with him. Clint didn't know what she'd been doing lately, but she had the tight look around her eyes that he knew meant she was burning her own candle at both ends. So, yeah, naps all around. Phil would be proud.

Tony's new tech turned out to be a pair of glasses that interfaced with JARVIS and let Clint see everything that was being said, like a mini closed-captioned projection in near real time. Clint sat and looked at the little screen on the edge of the lenses and tried to wrap his brain around somebody going to this much effort for him. New arrowheads and tech like that, yeah, sure, that helped everyone. This was different, but when he tried to explain, Tony shrugged him off.

 _Suck it, GoogleGlass,_ Tony said with a manic, gleeful grin and held his fist up until Clint bumped it. 

Clint wandered around the rest of the day, figuring out the limitations of the glasses and getting himself used to their quirks. Tony's bots were happy to interact with him, so he wasn't bothering anyone. JARVIS scrolled Clint's own words in a different color on the projection, varying the font weight to show how loud he was being. It made it so Clint could sort of work out how it felt to talk in a normal tone, made it so he didn't feel like he was sounding like an idiot and not knowing. He really, seriously owed Tony.

The doctors all thought he was a good candidate for reconstructive surgery on his eardrums, but they were going to have to heal a little more before anything could be done, and even then, it was going to have to happen one ear at a time. And there were no guarantees. In other words, it was gonna take a while to get himself out of this mess, if that was even possible, so Clint figured he'd better work out how the hell to take care of himself if worst came to worst. 

That didn't mean he wasn't happy to see Bruce show up with a couple of string bags worth of vegetables and spices, or that he didn't enjoy every last (blazing) bite of the curry they concocted. Nobody else liked the super-hot peppers and spices that Clint and Bruce did; even when Clint was living in BedStuy, he'd made it back to the Tower once a week or so to burn off a layer of taste buds with Bruce. If Clint ignored the ringing in his ears--and the pretty strong feeling that Bruce was the designated Clint-sitter for the night--dinner was actually kinda normal. 

Nat stayed with him for the first couple of nights, which Clint appreciated a little bit more than he hated needing it, but then got called out on an op with Cap and Strike. The timing was good: just long enough for Clint to figure out a routine and right before he and Nat got to the point of trying to kill each other. Usually, they could go a little bit longer than a few days, but Clint's balance was still off so they couldn't spar and get rid of their irritations that way. 

Clint knew Nat probably had reinforcements on tap, but it still surprised the hell out of him the next day when Pepper showed up on his floor. 

_Lunch?_ Pepper said, looking Clint over with a quick, flickering glance that missed nothing, not the bandages over his ears, or Tony's glasses, and especially not where he'd looped Phil's dog tags over his neck after he'd showered that morning. _We can order in anything you like…_

 _I'm hearing a giant 'but',_ Clint said, really hoping JARVIS's volume measures were calibrated okay. It didn't matter if he was yelling at Nat or Bruce or the rest of them, but Pepper was, well, Pepper, and so far out of Clint's league it wasn't even funny. He didn't need to make it worse. 

_You and Phil are the only people who believe I *like* chili dogs,_ Pepper said, no stumble at all over Phil's name even though Clint knew things were still awkward between them. _No one else ever takes me seriously when I say I have Nathan's on speed-dial._ Clint hadn't talked to her much since he'd moved out--her schedule had her all over the world and Clint could probably admit to avoiding a lot of people while he and Phil had been trying to put things back together with each other, but she stood there in her thousand dollar suit and smiled at Clint like he was the one doing her the favor, and Clint had to take a couple of seconds to wonder at his life and all the good things that he'd never seen coming. 

_Make it a spicy redneck from Crif's and you're on._ Clint led her into his apartment, thanking whatever guardian angel had prodded at him to get his ass out of bed and act like a reasonable human being that morning. At least he could pretend to be something other than a walking disaster. On his way to grab a couple of waters out of the refrigerator he tucked the dog tags under his t-shirt and then circled back to where Pepper was making herself at home on the couch, neatly sidestepping the shoes she'd kicked off. Given how much he assumed she paid for them, he really didn't want to take any chances with stomping on them with his boots.

 _You don't have to hide them,_ Pepper said, nodding to where the tags sat under Clint's shirt. _I'm sorry if we made you feel that way._ Clint shrugged.

 _I didn't want you to feel like you had to feel one way or another about him._ He rubbed the back of his neck, willing the tension to stay away. _Putting us back together was… I dunno, I guess I was waiting to see if it was going to work before I started talking about it. Phil was good with however I wanted it to go._

 _If you'd asked me what I might say to the two of you back together, I probably wouldn't have been in favor of it,_ Pepper said. She was talking slowly enough that the captioning on the glasses was more in synch than Clint had ever seen. It figured it was something he didn't really want to hear, because however much he valued Pepper's opinion, it wasn't going to matter here. _But… I was at the hospital when he got there--_ Pepper said. 

_How was he--how did he look?_ Clint interrupted. He hadn't felt like he could ask Cap--he and Phil still were pretty stiff with each other--and Natasha hadn't told him anything other than life was what it was and that Phil would be annoyed if Clint wasn't focused on himself. Phil had been in contact, but whatever was going on with his team, they weren't any place where communications were easy. The best he and Clint had been able to do were message drops, where it was taking a couple days for anything to get a reply and subtle things like tone weren't really included. Clint got it--it was the SHIELD life--but it didn't mean he didn't worry.

 _He was very focused on you and upset that he couldn't stay, but under all of that, he looked… better,_ Pepper said. _The agent who was with him--Agent May? She didn't seem concerned._

 _Okay, well, it was May, so nuclear threats are about the only things that worry her, but that's good to know,_ Clint said. _Thanks. Sorry about the surprise._

 _It probably would have been less dramatic if we'd known you two were back together,_ Pepper said, and Clint could tell from her expression that she was working her dry, yes-I-wrangle-Tony-Stark-nothing-can-phase-me tone. _Things were a bit tense until Natasha and Agent May could make people listen._

Clint couldn't decide if he wanted to know what Nat had done or not (his best guess involved her throwing knives), but then the delivery arrived and he could lose himself in the goodness of a bacon-wrapped chili dog with extra jalapenos. Or two. Pepper looked very pleased with her own order; Clint was madly envious of her skill in keeping the suit clean. 

So. It was good, having someone there to talk to, and even though it was Pepper (who was not Clint's normal lunch partner, not by a long shot) it was pretty easy-going and way less awkward than Clint would have imagined. She couldn't stay for long; her schedule was packed, no surprise there. When she left, Clint decided he'd been checked off some list--a favor for Nat or whatever--and that was that, right up until Pepper showed up on his floor again the next day.

 _I'm stuck with healthy food today,_ she said, holding up a shopping bag that proved to be full of grilled chicken and shrimp and enough vegetables to start a stall at the farmer's market. _But JARVIS can order you anything you might want… It won't take any time at all._

Clint probably didn't want to know how much business Stark Industries threw at local restaurants to get the kind of response time they did, but he decided a vegetable or two wasn't going to kill him and went with the healthy stuff. Pepper laid everything out on the island in the kitchen and they built their plates in a sort of easy camaraderie. Clint tried his best not to be an idiot, but he really had no idea why she was there. She was good at small talk, though, and the kind that wasn't just meaningless. He didn't usually talk about his carnie days, but he'd pulled out a few of the more socially-acceptable stories back in the post-AIM days so he didn't deflect when she brought the subject up now. It helped that she didn't have that creepy, oh-you-poor-kid look in her eyes, but seemed thoughtfully interested. 

Again, it was good--nice to talk to somebody who wasn't a doctor--but then she showed up for the third day in a row and Clint found himself saying, _Not that I mind the company, but don't you have something better to do?_

Pepper set down her bag of takeout--sushi this time--and smoothed her hair back off her face. She'd gone to a shorter cut after the whole thing with Aldridge--change was good after shitty scenarios like that--but Clint could tell she was beginning to miss the extra length. 

_No,_ she said. _I don't._ She looked at Clint, and he knew she was daring him to say everything that was written across his face, his disbelief and irritation at being something to be taken care of. 

_Yeah, I'm gonna have to call bullshit on that._ Clint was probably talking too loud, and he knew he was way too aggressive, but she should have known he never backed down from a dare.

 _That's fine,_ Pepper shrugged. _You're wrong, though._ She stared him down until he broke and picked up the damn bag of fish and stalked off toward the kitchen area. He was behaving badly, that was pretty easy to see, but he hated being a special case. She was polite and smooth and everything that you'd expect, so it was never awkward, but he didn't need her feeling sorry for him. 

Neither one of them spoke while Clint unloaded the bag, spreading the flat plastic trays out across the counter before hunting down a couple of pairs of the ebony chopsticks Natasha had brought him back from Kyoto. Pepper accepted the set he held out to her, but put them down next to her plate almost immediately. Clint got it: it wasn't going to be her who dodged the issue. He thought about ignoring her and just starting in on the food, but ultimately decided he wasn't going to be that much of an asshole, no matter how much he didn't want to have the conversation about how he shouldn't feel like a charity case. He bit back a sigh and settled onto a bar stool across from where she was standing. 

Pepper nodded once and took a stool of her own and let Clint avoid her eyes for another couple minutes. Finally, though, she pushed a note across the counter and went back to waiting, still composed and calm, until he decided he could deal with continuing the conversation and picked it up. He wasn't sure exactly what he was expecting, but it wasn't to read, _How many days did you miss working out with me while Tony was stabilizing Extremis?_

When he looked up at her, she was watching him with serious enough eyes that he blew off trying to find some kind of a smartass answer and just shrugged. He probably could have been a little less dick-ish, but he honestly didn't know. It had taken Tony a couple of months to figure out the deal with Killian's super-juice and Clint-- well, it had been back when he was trying to get past Phil's death. The whole time was a blur.

Another note edged into his view. This one read _4 days_. He hadn't even looked up when she pushed the next one over to him. _3 for Avenger-business and 1 because I hit you too hard & you spent the night in Medical._

 _Not your fault,_ Clint said as soon as the words registered. He and Natasha had tag-teamed Pepper in her enhanced state, working through what did and didn't keep the heat signatures of the virus under control. It got a little rough sometimes, but it was all for a good cause. _I could have ducked but I got cocky and tried for the flip._

 _Not the point,_ Pepper said, and the smile in her eyes said that she was pretty damn satisfied that they were at least speaking to each other again. _I'm trying to say that after thirteen weeks of helping me regulate that mess, and ridiculous amounts of ice cream and bad movies after nearly every session, *no*, I do not have anyplace better to be right now._

She picked up her chopsticks and carefully filled her plate from the small plastic platters of sushi. Clint guessed that being around Stark she'd gotten a lot of practice dealing with bullshit drama, but before he could say anything like that, she added, _If I'm bothering you, I'll back off, but making time in my schedule to take the elevator up here and eat an actual lunch with a friend is not something I'm doing out of pity or obligation._

JARVIS and his magic translating glasses were nifty and all, but he couldn't translate tone or inflections. It was a missing piece of the puzzle, but Clint could admit that the part of his brain that wasn't accepting the sincerity in Pepper's face and body language was probably the part that was tied to all the shit that had happened in the past. He made himself nod, but couldn't help adding, _I'm kind of a mess, you know that, right?_

Pepper held her hand out, her perfect manicure setting off the ring Tony had given her. She held it there long enough that he could see Extremis glowing ever so faintly under her delicate skin. _Aren't we all?_ she said.

* - * - * - *

Nat came back after a week with that glint in her eye that said she'd definitely enjoyed herself and left a trail of bodies in her wake. It was good having her around, but he was getting his feet back under him, so Clint told her he was fine and she should get back to her own routine. She looked him over closely, but must have decided he wasn't being too stupid, because she agreed to stay at her own place. She still spent most of the day harassing him at the Tower, but what else was new?

Clint's days had fallen into a roughly predictable pattern. Jess came by the Tower pretty much every day and usually went with him when he went to see Barney. He kept refusing to die, no matter what the doctors kept warning Clint about, so some days they didn't do anything but sit around and play cards to pass the time between the five minutes every hour Clint could go watch him sleep in the ICU, but other days, he was conscious and knew Clint was there, which made a lot of the other crap bearable. It wasn't much, but at least Clint could tell himself he hadn't gotten his brother killed. Yet.

Jess wasn't quite as fast at Morse code as Nat was, but she could keep Clint in the loop when the doctors were spinning Barney's test results and not being particularly great at writing shit out. He probably would have gone ballistic by the second or third day without her. He still worried about why she kept coming back, though. She'd had a really rough year and him fucking around on her hadn't helped. He appreciated her coming with him, but he didn't want to be piling any more shit on her.

 _You don't have to do this._ Clint wrote as neatly as he could and then passed her the notebook and pen he carried everywhere now. He'd intended to wait until they were back in JARVIS-interface land, so they could 'talk', but they always stopped at the same coffee shop on the way back from the hospital and it had started feeling like their own private place, something apart from SHIELD and the Avengers and all the ways he'd screwed up before. It was crowded enough that they were wedged into a tiny corner table and he could read her answer as she wrote.

 _I'm okay._ Jess tapped the pen thoughtfully against the paper, and then added, _I had my hands in his chest--I feel like we're connected and I want to see it through._ The barista caught Clint's eye and Clint went up to get their sugar-and-caffeine-highs masquerading as coffee--it turned out Spiderwoman was all about the candy coffee and who was Clint to argue?

 _It's my choice_ , Jess had written when Clint got back. She underlined the words as he sat down and that, that was the one thing Clint wasn't going to fight her on. He couldn't, and from the look she was giving him, she knew it. He sighed but nodded as he handed over her whipped-cream-and-caramel monstrosity and told himself not to forget how goddamn lucky he was that he hadn't totally fucked things between them.

As for the rest of his time, he emailed and texted a lot with Bobbi, who translated all the medical stuff--both Barney's and his own--without making him feel like an idiot. Pepper kept showing up for lunch or sometimes breakfast whenever she was in Manhattan and Clint was gradually getting to the point where he didn't feel guilty for taking her away from whatever she needed to be doing. Tony wandered in at odd times, depending on how well he was or wasn't sleeping, and fiddled with the glasses or handed over updates to Clint's quiver. That usually ended in a trip to the range to try out the new stuff, but it wasn't like Clint didn't already know that time with a bow in his hands was better than meditation at keeping his mind clear.

For other times, JARVIS had a complete video course on ASL that Clint used to keep his brain occupied. The easiest part of the day was almost always dinner with Bruce because Clint at least felt like he was giving as much as he was getting there. Bruce liked to take care of people and was making up for years of not really being able to; plus, Clint knew Bruce tended to ignore anything but the basics when it was him alone so Clint being there meant Bruce took better care of himself. It was kinda selfish, but it helped that there was at least something Clint could do for someone else, no matter how little.

And then, once every couple of days, Phil would get a message to him and Clint let himself sit and read it as many times as he wanted. Clint knew most people wouldn't think it was enough to build a life together on (which was why most SHIELD agents had such shitty track records with long-term relationships) but he'd learned early on that wanting and getting weren't the same things at all.

With Natasha back and not being pulled into anything new for SHIELD, she and Clint picked up where they'd left off with sifting through the BedStuy paper trail, piecing together the layers of shell corporations who owned the surrounding properties, hoping to figure out who was at the top. Slogging through tax records and zoning board minutes was slow going, but every day, Clint came back from the hospital with Barney's painful, too-shallow breathing burned into his brain and kept right on going. The Bartons might never have been at the top of any class, but they were goddamned stubborn. Barney wasn't dying, and Clint wasn't backing down on this at all.

Pepper saw their notes laying around one afternoon (sometimes lunch ended up being late enough that Pepper called it high tea--Clint went on record as saying that he didn't think he was allowed at something that sounded as classy as that, but Pepper and Natasha both ignored him, which wasn't much of a surprise.) She flipped through them while Natasha explained and the next thing Clint knew, a guy in a mid-level suit showed up and asked to be brought up to speed.

It turned out that he was from the real estate division at Stark and he knew all the tricks of hiding permit applications and where to look to see who on the zoning commission might have been getting paid off. With him directing JARVIS… Well, they still had a crapload of paperwork to go through, but it was targeted and focused and almost every page added another piece to the puzzle, another name to the roster of investors behind the coordinated attacks on the neighborhood. 

It was Clint's life, though, which meant nothing ever came easily, so he couldn't be too surprised when Natasha pushed her tablet across the table to him and pointed to where the tax office showed that Bishop Publishing had recently acquired a warehouse they had no real use for now that they were almost totally ebooks, one that was a block away from Clint's place. 

_Maybe it's a coincidence,_ Clint said. Natasha didn't answer, but she didn't need to. They kept looking and to nobody's shock, Derek Bishop's name came up three more times. _Or not._

 _Probably not,_ Natasha agreed. She added the name to their list and then sat and looked at him.

 _Shit._ Clint put his head down on the table, resisting the urge to bang it because that'd probably set off the vertigo and he really didn't need to throw up right at the moment. _How'm I supposed to tell Katie her dad's involved in this mess?_

_With love,_ Natasha said, and when he groaned into the table, she flicked the back of his head lightly. Considering the source, it was really a love tap, which Clint didn't know that he deserved, but wasn't too proud to accept anyway. _It's better that it comes from you, which you already know._

 _Yeah,_ Clint admitted. He stayed down for another couple of seconds, but staring at the wood grain on the table wasn't going to help anything. He sat back up and scrubbed his hand through his hair. _Still sucks._

 _It does,_ Natasha said. _But it is not your fault that an intelligent, already very wealthy man felt the need for more money so keenly that he allied himself with a group using the Russian mob to accomplish their goals, much less one that has a hit man on call. His daughter needs to know._

Clint shrugged. Kate already had issues with her dad; this was only going to make all that worse and probably drag her sister into the mess, too. He hated that, and yeah, he got that a lot of that hate came from his own family issues, but it still was a shitty situation.

 _I think it's probably a good time to stop for the day,_ Natasha said. Clint was about to tell her they could keep going--he'd already maxed out his range time and he wasn't going to do anything but sit around and stress about Katie until it was time for Bruce and dinner--but then the lights flickered in what Clint privately called JARVIS's 'You've Got ~~Mail~~ Guests' code and Phil walked off the elevator.

 _Holy shit_ , Clint said, lunging up and across the room so fast his chair crashed to the floor behind him. He caught a glimpse of Nat smiling at his reaction, but then he had his hands on Phil and everything else was completely irrelevant. He thought he might be clinging, but Phil had his arms around Clint and was holding on just as hard, so Clint wasn't going to worry about it.

 _Bye,_ Natasha tapped on his back as she stepped around them. She was past and the elevator door closed behind her before Clint thought to answer, which was probably good, because he wasn't sure he was going to make himself let go of Phil for a while and it seemed kinda rude just to keep ignoring her.

Finally, though, Phil said, _Let me see you,_ , and Clint reluctantly eased back a couple of inches. He still kept both hands on Phil's shoulders, though, because it turned out they really weren't keen on the idea of not being able to touch him.

Phil didn't seem to mind. He looked Clint over with something more than his usual post-mission thoroughness. Clint had actually been pretty up-front about everything this time, so Phil shouldn't be getting any nasty surprises. _The glasses are very trendy,_ Phil said, smiling. 

_Oh, god,_ Clint groaned. _I look like a hipster freak, don't I?_

Phil only laughed and Clint silently cursed Tony and how his genius came with a side order of smartass. It didn't really matter, though, because Phil took Clint's face in his hands and leaned his forehead against Clint's and they breathed together for a long few seconds.

 _You look good,_ Phil said. 

_You don't,_ Clint answered. It was true, too. Phil's eyes were tired and stressed, the small lines at the corners deeper and more pronounced than smiles and laughter could account for. He was pale, too, and not pulled together like he usually was. His suit actually looked limp and rumpled; Clint had seen him step out of a fucking jungle in better shape. 

_I--_ Phil stayed leaning against Clint for longer than Clint expected. He still missed Phil's warmth when he straightened up and moved away from Clint. _Things have happened,_ Phil started and he looked worse with every word, more strained and helpless than Clint could ever remember seeing him.

 _Bad, weird things, I'm guessing,_ Clint said, not exactly joking, but hell, sometimes you had to laugh or you'd go down screaming. 

_You wouldn't be wrong,_ Phil answered, but he looked like he was breathing a little easier. He let Clint steer him into the apartment and settle him on the overstuffed, ridiculous couch that Stark's decorators had decided Clint needed. Clint had lived in a lot of places that were smaller than the damn couch, but it was insanely comfortable, so he wasn't going to roll his eyes over it too much. 

Clint sat down next to Phil and handed him a bottle of water. _Tell me,_ he said, and Phil held onto to Clint's hand and did. At the end of it all, Skye being shot and the mad scramble for what FitzSimmons thought might have saved Phil and thus might help her, storming the lab under the mountain, and Phil's final horrifying discovery of the alien life form coming too late to matter--at the end of all that, Clint could barely feel his hands where Phil was holding on to them so tight, but it didn't really matter, because it meant Phil knew Clint was right there with him. 

_Okay,_ Clint said slowly. There were so many landmines in all of what Phil said and he needed to go carefully. But if he took too long, he could see Phil would take that as him thinking Phil had fucked up, which would be worse. He ended up going with the first thing that popped into his head, even if it was kind of flip and inappropriate. _I'm trying to decide which arrowheads to use on Quinn. He went for the kid because she was the easy way to get to you. He thought about it, you know he did—he wouldn't have gone for May or Ward, but the kid? He didn't really see a downside to going after her. Guys like that, they need to learn that sometimes going after what they want means having an Avenger coming down on their ass._

_That's—not what I was expecting you to say._

_Really? I thought I was being pretty predictable and all._ Clint shrugged. Phil didn't exactly look happy, but he wasn't closed down either, so Clint was counting it as a win. _Have a problem, find an arrow._

 _Clint,_ Phil said. He yanked his hand out of Clint's. _I was injected with *alien DNA*. Worse, it's my fault that another person was also injected._

 _Okay,_ Clint said. _One thing at a time._ He reached to take Phil's hand back and ran his thumb over Phil's knuckles. _Alien DNA or not, you're here._ He brushed a kiss across the back of Phil's hand. _I had an alien in my brain--believe me, I get that it's pretty goddamn terrifying to think about, but seriously, Phil._ Clint had to stop and breathe before he could make himself say the next part. _You're not dead. We can deal with whatever the rest of it brings._

Phil shook his head, like he wasn't sure why Clint wasn't freaking out, but he didn't pull away again. Clint let everything be for a couple more seconds and then went on, _And the other thing, the part with Skye getting injected, too…_ There were so many things that could have blown up here, Clint really didn't want to keep going, but none of it was going to go away no matter how hard he wished. He'd at least figured that out over the last couple of years. _What did she say?_

 _Words to the effect of 'yay for not being dead.'_ Phil's expression had eased into something affectionate and fond; Clint remembered the days when he would have been crazy-jealous about Phil looking like that about someone else. Now, though, it was really simple to see how close Phil was leaning into Clint's space, how he'd laced his fingers between Clint's. It had always been that way; Clint had just never let himself believe it. _That still doesn't excuse what I did--_

 _Yeah, no, let's not start that,_ Clint said. _You made a call based on the best intel you had, one that worked, don't forget that part. The kid, she's alive. She might be looking at some issues down the line, but you did what you could. It's not all on you, remember? I'd be saying that even if she'd flipped out on you, but especially not now._

Phil didn't say anything more, but he was still tense and stiff, and fuck if Clint knew what more to say. Talking about shit really wasn't his thing, but he couldn't leave things like this. _Look,_ he said. _Go take advantage of Stark's fetish for overdone bathrooms, hit the shower. And then, I dunno, I'll see what I can come up with for the rest of the night._

 _Oh,_ Phil said, looking down at where they were still holding hands. _I'm not--I don't think I'm going to be up for sex tonight. I'm sorry--_ He stopped as Clint stiffened. _Clint?_

Clint would have given just about anything to have not reacted, because he could feel the press of the day--hell, the week, or really, the whole fucking month--slamming back down on him and all he could see was how much of a mess he was going to make of trying to explain, but it was done and all he could say was, _I didn't-- You know, sex wasn't actually what I was talking about. I mean, I get that it's my go-to for fixing things, but I didn't-- It wasn't what I was suggesting. I was thinking that you know how you tie yourself up in knots, almost literally, and it's not much, but I can at least work on your back and neck, you know? I just-- Barney's in the ICU because I was too stupid to figure out what was going on; and the kids who lived across from me ended up with guns to their heads, again because I was too fucking stupid--_

 _Clint,_ Phil said, but the words were rushing out of Clint now and he couldn't see any way to stop them. Or maybe it was that he didn't want to stop them because it stung that fucking was Phil's automatic assumption.

 _Jess was too nice and came back to help even after I screwed her over, and the best thing I can say is that at least she's not in the hospital right next to Barney because she wasn't even two damn steps behind him when he got shot. Nat's fucking burning the candle at both ends and she's not talking to me so I have no idea what's going on in her head; and for the cherry on this fucking trainwreck I get to figure out how to tell the kid who's saved my ass more than once that her father is neck deep in this shit. I can't do a goddamn thing about any of that, or about you and your alien and Skye, but I can at least work on getting it so you can turn your head without having to move your entire fucking body, okay?_

Clint was breathless and almost vibrating when he finally got his mouth under control; he guessed he wasn't dealing with all this shit so well after all. Phil was watching him carefully, but only answered, _Okay,_ and leaned in to press a kiss to Clint's temple. _Thank you._

Clint let JARVIS deal with showing Phil where the bathroom was and how to get the shower to do one of the pre-programmed massage patterns. He stayed where he was for a while, until his lizard brain leveled out enough that he wasn't purely in fight-or-flight mode. Phil was still there, so he didn't guess he'd screwed things up too bad; a part of his brain even felt like it was good that he'd said everything instead of just letting it build and fester. Of course, the rest of him thought he was an idiot who should have known better and just laughed it off, but that wasn't anything new.

 _J,_ Clint said, hauling himself to his feet and heading into the bedroom. _Bump the temperature up a couple degrees._

_Of course, Agent Barton._

Clint had pretty much given up on getting JARVIS to unbend far enough to call him Clint, but there were worse things in the world than over-formal AIs. The bedroom was its usual mess, but Phil wasn't going to be shocked by that. Clint smoothed out the rumpled sheets and comforter and moved the pillows out of the way. The lamp next to the bed had a super-low setting; he killed all the lights except that one and started in on warming up his hands and wrists, shaking them out so he could really work on Phil. Right as he finished up, Phil came out of the bathroom, a towel low around his hips, his skin still damp and flushed. He looked better, but not by much. 

_I'm sorry,_ Phil said. _I--it was thoughtless of me to assume--_

 _Yeah, well, it wasn't all you, ok?_ Clint patted the mattress and Phil crossed the room and stretched out face-down on the bed. Clint laid his hand on the middle of Phil's back, right next to the scar that was the most visible memento of everything that had killed Phil. Fury had double-crossed it, though, and got Phil back. Clint was going to owe him for that for a really long time, no matter what else had happened. _I--you remember when you gave me that awesome speech about how you went into planning overdrive because you figured I was gonna be bored if you didn't?_ Phil nodded into the pillow and then shivered as Clint ran his thumbs down either side of his spine. _Yeah, me, too--I mean, I kinda had the same thought--I figured the only way I was gonna keep you interested was if I blew your mind in bed. I really, really wanted you to stay, so, I, uh, maybe went a little overboard with that._

Phil turned so he could look at Clint, and Clint smiled and shrugged. _I mean, it's not like it wasn't what I wanted to do all the time anyway, but…_

Phil smiled back, and then shook his head helplessly. _We are--I don't even know what we are, but we can never let Natasha know how--_

 _Idiotic?_ Clint suggested.

 _Hopeless,_ Phil decided. 

_You know it's too late, right?_ Clint said. _There's no way she's been around us with us for as long as she has and doesn't know._

 _We don't need to confirm it,_ Phil said. He leaned up on one elbow and drew Clint down so he could kiss him carefully, thoroughly. Clint let himself sink into the kiss, into Phil, opened his mouth and let Phil have anything he wanted and took a little bit of his own, too. He lost track of how long they stayed like that, but when they broke apart for the last time, he moved only far enough that he could rest his forehead against Phil's for another long while. Phil didn't rush him, only combed his fingers through the hair at the base of Clint's skull. Clint might have been arching into the touch, because Phil was smiling, but that didn't bother Clint at all. Before Phil laid back down, Clint got eyes on him and decided he already looked better, less stressed and tired. There was still going to be some serious body work happening, though; Clint really didn't like how stiffly Phil had been holding himself and that wasn't going to go away without a little direct intervention.

 _I should have said something earlier, but I was kinda distracted with how I couldn't believe you thought all that stuff about you being boring._ Clint started with another sweep along Phil's spine, pressing not-quite-hard with the heel of both hands. Phil made a noise that JARVIS interpreted as a long string of jumbled letters. Combined with how Phil was sinking down into the mattress, Clint decided it was a good not-word and kept going. 

He went carefully, feeling for the places that were knotted tight and finding a lot of them, even more than he'd been expecting. _Fuck, Phil,_ Clint muttered, easing off as much as he could. _Your whole back is a hotspot_. 

_Got thrown off a train._ Phil twitched and jerked every time Clint hit a particularly tender area but he didn't try to move away. Clint took that as a directive not to stop. _Got into a firefight. Ran like hell to get out of the mountain rigged to blow on me._

 _I'm actually not trying to be a smartass here, but you might be getting too old for this kind of shit,_ Clint told him. Phil shrugged, a tiny movement of his shoulders, but otherwise didn't answer, and yeah, Clint got it. Too old or not, it was the life and they were both neck-deep in it. He shut up after that and focused on making things better. 

JARVIS had done as Clint had asked and gotten the ambient temperature up high enough that Clint didn't need to worry about Phil getting chilled, so he took his time and worked Phil over good. It was hypnotic in a way, watching his hands on Phil's back, feeling it, too: skin-to-skin, warm and alive. Clint lost himself in it, paying just enough attention to the muscles loosening gradually under his touch to know when to get on to the next section. Phil let Clint move him however Clint wanted, his arms and legs heavy and yielding as Clint worked on them, too. He rolled onto his back when Clint asked, smiling slowly when Clint couldn't resist stealing a kiss.

Clint passed his hand over Phil's eyes, and Phil obediently closed them. It shouldn't have been all that big of a deal--in his head, Clint knew Phil trusted him--but seeing that trust in action drove it home in a way that shifted Clint's world. Phil was there, naked except for a towel, scarred and vulnerable and hurting, and it was Clint he'd come to, Clint he was allowing to help. Clint took a couple of deep breaths and then got back to it, kneading along where Phil's neck curved into his shoulders and then following the tendon down over his collar bones and into his pecs. He kissed the tips of his fingers and traced the long, ugly curve of scar tissue left from Loki's spear. He felt the old familiar tug of grief and guilt, but that wasn't for now, so he shoved it back in its slimy corner and went back to what he could make better. 

Phil smiled again when Clint worked his way down his biceps and over the tendon in his wrists and dropped more kisses in his palms. Clint watched him carefully, counting the slow, deep breaths as he shifted to get the final knots in Phil's calves and ended with his feet. He didn't think Phil had fallen asleep but he was relaxed and peaceful, and that was more than good enough for Clint. 

He stood up and stretched out the kinks from being crouched over, and shook out his hands and wrists. He thought about going and getting something to drink, but then Phil crooked his fingers in a clear 'come here' gesture. When Clint looked, Phil's eyes were slitted open, as if they were too heavy for anything but the bare minimum of movement, and he crooked his fingers again. Clint was pretty sweaty and gross--when JARVIS didn't want anyone to take a chill, he meant it--but Phil was asking for something and Clint wasn't going to be the one to say no, especially when it was something he wanted anyway. He stripped off his t-shirt and jeans and crawled up next to Phil. It took a little doing, but they worked out how to be so that there was maximum contact without messing with Clint's bandages.

Clint figured they'd stay for a while and then go deal with the rest of their lives--it was barely dinnertime and honestly, they'd never been much of a couple for cuddling. Touching, yeah; fucking, oh, hell yes; but not so much with the full-body, breathing-each-others-air cuddling. Phil was right there, though, warm and relaxed, and Clint had missed him so fucking much. The longer Clint was wrapped up with Phil, the stupider moving seemed to be. Phil must have agreed, because the next thing Clint knew, it was sunrise and moving was unfortunately no longer optional. 

Phil was a little stiff--Clint really should have gotten him some water to flush out the lactic acid from the massage before they crashed--but he insisted it wasn't anything a shower and a little ibuprofen couldn't handle. Even with all that, he was moving about a hundred times better than he had been the day before. Clint was pretty satisfied with himself as he roamed around the kitchen and threw together some breakfast. He wasn't all that great of a cook, but JARVIS sourced only the best, which more than made up for any lack on his part. Besides, knowing Phil, he'd probably been living on those disgusting kale shakes for a while. Local, free-range and organic eggs--much less the coffee Tony had overnighted from his plantation in Hawaii--would be like a miracle after a couple of weeks of that.

Phil came out into the main living area, shrugging on his jacket and straightening his cuffs. If Clint looked really close, he could see where the lines around Phil's eyes and mouth were still too deep, but the rest of him looked sharp. Clint would have said he was back to being the agents' agent, except he knew better, knew how much Phil had changed since everything Loki and the spear had rained down on them. Not the core--Phil was still honorable and smart and funny, all the things Clint had been drawn to even before they'd started fucking around with each other. The other stuff, though, the impatience and the perfectionism, the tendency to micromanage everything--that had faded into a shadow of what it had once been. 

Clint wasn't too good at introspection, but he thought he might have changed some himself. He could still fuck things up spectacularly--his current situation proved that--but he wasn't just calling it quits and letting everybody else deal with it. He had people beyond Phil and Nat that he trusted to have his back and who trusted him to have theirs. He'd managed to patch things together with Barney well enough that he thought they might survive this mess. All his life, he'd wanted to belong, but it had taken so long he hadn't known what to do when it had finally happened. He thought he was moving forward on that now, but it still was a surprise to find himself saying, _Hey, Phil? I, uh--if you ever get to where you're thinking about asking me to marry you again, I--you should know up front that I'll say yes._

Phil froze with his coffee cup halfway to his mouth; Clint shrugged, half in apology, half in horror at what he'd actually just said. _I--Sorry? That was random, I know. I just--my brain and mouth don't always tell me what they're going to do, you know that--_

He was babbling, but there didn't seem to be much he could do about it. 

_Clint._ Phil had always known how to answer what Clint was really saying, often before Clint knew what he was asking himself. Clint hoped like hell this was one of those times, because he thought he might know what he hadn't been able to say, and it was scaring the shit out of him. Phil put his coffee back down on the island and crossed around to where Clint was standing. He took Clint's mug out of his hands and put it down, too, and then very carefully finger-spelled Clint's name in ASL.

 _That's me,_ Clint said. _When did you learn to sign?_

 _When you told me you had started working with it. I've only had time to learn a few things, but I wanted to be able to communicate just with you, no routing through JARVIS,_ Phil said. Contrary to public opinion, Clint could take a hint, so he pushed Tony's glasses on top of his head and waited to see what Phil wanted to tell him. Phil smiled at him, and then, just as carefully as before, every finger perfectly in place, signed, _Will you marry me?_

Clint's brain kind of stuttered to a halt. He'd only been signing for a couple of weeks and wasn't entirely sure he wasn't just seeing what he wanted to see. He managed to keep himself from blurting that out, though, because that--not believing he could have something so good--that was everything he'd been before and hadn't he just decided he'd moved past all that?

He resisted the urge to ask Phil to repeat himself, or to write it all down so Clint could be sure. He didn't need all that. One look at Phil's face told him he'd seen exactly what Phil had said. It also told him Phil was starting to freak out over his silence, so he reached out and took Phil's hand in his.

 _I'm pretty sure I already said this,_ Clint said, tugging on Phil's hand so he'd come closer. _But yeah, yes, I'll marry you._

Phil caught Clint's face in both hands and looked at him for a long time before he tilted his head down and kissed Clint. Clint kissed him back and reached behind himself to shove all the stuff back far enough that he could sit on the counter and pull Phil to stand between his legs. In a couple minutes, the world was going to start yelling for one or the other of them. Phil had to get back to his team and Clint needed to get to the hospital and check in on Barney. All the shit that had been there before was still out there waiting, but Clint couldn't care less. For right this minute, there was nothing but him and Phil and Clint had more than he'd ever dreamed possible.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not entirely sure where _Hawkeye_ is going with what happened at the end of #15, so everything I have here is probably going to be AU before long. I do think they're setting up Clint's canonical deafness, and Kate Bishop's father is definitely involved so those parts are probably ok. I hope they don't kill Barney--I like how he and Clint interact in this particular canon so I didn't kill him here.

**Author's Note:**

> I had no idea I was going to have so much canon to deal with when I started this, and it ended up going to places I hadn't even begun to think about, but it was a ton of fun to figure out how many things I could work in. 
> 
> I should probably also mention that Clint Barton is the world's most unreliable narrator, especially when it comes to himself, but that's half of what makes him so fun to write. I might have an epilogue for this, to fold in the canon from end of the AoS season/Cap 2, but this was always about Clint and Phil and this felt like the right place to end that story. 
> 
> Thanks so much to everyone who read along and commented and kudo'd--I don't think I'd have gotten through all of this without all of you!
> 
> Title from _Garden_ , by Sean Hayes
> 
> eta: Come see me on [tumblr](http://topaz119.tumblr.com/) \--it's always awesome to see more Clint & Phil on my dash! My tag for the posts I kept in mind while I was writing this is [here](http://topaz119.tumblr.com/tagged/aowrtt).


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